


The Synapses of Self

by tastewithouttalent



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alcohol, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Best Friends, Developing Relationship, Drunken Kissing, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Hacking, Hand Jobs, Insomnia, Light Angst, Literal Sleeping Together, Living Together, Love Confessions, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-08-03
Packaged: 2018-09-20 06:48:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 27
Words: 51,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9479972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tastewithouttalent/pseuds/tastewithouttalent
Summary: Memories are important. For Alex, the knowledge in his head makes the difference between his continued freedom as an underground hacker or suffering the untender mercies of the Security Office that holds sway over the city.Law-abiding Tristan's memories as a security guard are significantly less useful, and Alex is not best pleased to find himself with the wrong set after an accident with an outdated memory scanner. Worse: without an easy way to untangle them, Alex has to take Tristan – and the memories Tristan carries in his head – with him while he looks for a solution to allow them both to return to their respective lives.





	1. Chapter 1

He doesn’t remember who he is when he comes to.

He thinks at first this is because of the headache. It’s a bad one, pounding against the inside of his skull with a slow-steady rhythm that promises to continue for several hours regardless of what is done in an attempt to soothe it. He groans at the next wash of pain, lifting a hand to press against his forehead -- or tries to, anyway, because the motion stalls halfway through as he feels himself move, as he sees his hand. There’s nothing _wrong_ with it, really; he has all five fingers, and there’s no sign of blood or bruises or any other kind of trauma. The longer he looks at it the more normal it appears, except that it’s...not right, somehow, there’s something uncanny and foreign to the way the hand moves, to the shape of the fingers and how easily they shift independently of each other. He’s staring at the motion, his forehead creased on focused confusion as he tries to determine what exactly is ruining his sense of self, when he realizes he can’t remember his name.

He can remember other things. He can remember the rhythm of typing, can call up the pace of his fingers gliding over the familiar shape of a keyboard even if he can’t recall the outline of the letters appearing on the screen. He can remember the taste of his favorite food, can even remember the bright crimson color of its peel and the not-quite spherical shape fitting against his palm, though the name of that eludes him as much as anything else. His memories are a jumble, untouched expanses of familiarity interspersed with sudden unexpected gaps that trip his mental focus, and as he reaches for details he comes back around to the loss, to the absence, to the oddity that he can call up the feel of his signature under his hand but not his _name_. He reaches and the knowledge vanishes; he can feel it in the periphery of his thoughts but it evaporates the moment he tries to pin it down. The effort isn’t helping his headache either; it’s spread now, out into the shape of his face and arcing down his spine, and this is _really_ unpleasant, he’s pretty sure he can feel his body starting to cramp in sympathetic pain to his head. He’d stop reaching for his name if he could, but it’s _important_ , even more important than the ache in his skull, so instead of letting it go he lifts the hand that may-or-may-not be his and may-or-may-not be lifetime-familiar to shove against the ache in his forehead in an attempt to push the pain away by force.

“Fuck,” he says, in a voice that resonates against the inside of his chest in a way he’s never noticed before. “What the _fuck_.”

“Alexei?”

The headache makes the epiphany worse.

It’s a lot to take in, Alex knows. He gives himself that leniency, at least, that when he shuts his eyes in the first wave of understanding it’s a completely justified reaction and not just a moment of weakness in the face of an insurmountable problem. And at least he knows who he is, suddenly; the shape of a name to give himself in his own head is a comfort, even if the extra syllable at the end offers a whole array of volunteered answers to questions he definitely did _not_ want to ask. It’s not just a matter of hearing his name; it’s the full length of it, the shape of the sound one Alex hasn’t heard since he was a child, and then only from his mother’s lips. It’s the fact that he knows, now, why his hands feel strange, why his body feels perfectly ordinary and simultaneously heavier and smaller than he is used to, why he is faintly startled when he turns his head and doesn’t have the weight of waist-length hair moving with it.

“Fuck,” he says against the texture of the floor without bothering to lift his aching head. “What the _fuck_ did you do?”

“I don’t know.” The voice is familiar, Alex isn’t surprised to realize, if weighted with the strange uncanny sense that comes with hearing yourself in a recording. “I was supposed to get a read of the top-level memories in your longterm storage but I...don’t think I did.”

“No fucking kidding.” Alex lets his hand go from his head and braces it against the floor instead so he can start to push himself upright. It’s something of a process. “Where the fucking hell did you get that outdated piece of _shit_ memory scanner?”

“What?” Alex doesn’t look up from the floor; he just grits his teeth and waits for the apparently idiotic security guard to catch up to the conversation. “They gave it to me when I started work here.”

 _There wasn’t supposed to be a guard._ “So what, this morning?” There must have been an unexpected change in the security assignments, one that happened after Alex retrieved the security details from the main data bank for this location. Or maybe what he retrieved was a false trail in the first place, bait laid behind enough layers of security to fool even his experience into thinking he had the real thing. Alex grits his teeth against the surge of self-recrimination that flares hot inside his chest. It’s been _years_ since he was in this bad of a situation, and longer since he was stupid enough to blame sloppiness on immaturity. Not that his irritation makes a difference now, either for his situation or for himself; he turns it outward instead, forms the agony of his headache into a razor edge on his voice as he lashes out at the other. “Those scanners were recalled _years_ ago. They shouldn’t even exist anymore, much less be handed out to idiots fresh out of training who think they know what they’re doing.”

There’s a sharp inhale from the guard, the sound of injured pride clear under the breath. “Excuse me,” he says, sharp and bright and cold with the haughty dignity of someone straining for every year of maturity he can gain. “I am _not_ fresh out of training, I--”

“Then you’re an _idiot_ ,” Alex cuts him off, “and it’s a miracle you haven’t managed to blow yourself up yet.” When he looks up whatever is in his expression is enough to stop the protest on the other’s lips, enough to tilt him back in instinctive retreat against the wall. He doesn’t look like much of a guard; his uniform is appropriate enough, Alex decides, but the soft of his mouth and the fright visible behind his grey eyes are more than enough to undermine any credibility he might have as one of the stone-faced Security Officers Alex avoids at all costs. Besides, there’s the tell of his hair; the Officers all have short hair, cut brutally close to their scalp as much for the intimidation of presenting a singular matched aspect as for the ease of care, and this guard has a whole sheaf of it, a pale gold ponytail that falls nearly to his hips with the weight of length Alex recalls from his -- from _not_ his -- past. “Those scanners were recalled for a _reason_ , they short out when they try to connect two users over a gap of more than a few upgrades. Which apparently we _have_ , because _you_ haven’t been keeping your personal software updated.”

The guard’s shoulders stiffen, his mouth flattens into a hard line of irritation. “I _have_ , I ran an update just last month.”

Alex raises his eyebrows. “Last month,” he repeats. “Not the one that came out last _week_ , I take it?” The guard deflates, curling in as if to protect himself from Alex’s glare, and Alex keeps talking, gaining a vicious edge to his voice, now, as the bitter satisfaction of the other’s cringing response draws him to dig deeper and bite harder. “Not that I care,” he says, dismissing the other’s entire existence in a bare handful of words. “You can do whatever you please with your own software. But you _can’t_ use this recalled piece of _shit_ if you’re going to do that.” He reaches out as he speaks to drag the weight of the scanner out of the other’s unresisting hold and fling it sideways; it makes a satisfying _bang_ against the wall of the corridor, the electronics hissing and crackling protest at this abuse.

“You said,” the guard says, and Alex turns back to glare at him, cutting off his speech into silence as good as a whimper for indicating his fright. But then his mouth sets, his eyes come up, and when he speaks again it’s steadier, his voice evening out into more self-confidence than Alex thought him master of. “You said it was recalled because it shorted out. But it’s still functioning, it didn’t--”

“No,” Alex cuts him off. “It didn’t.” He tips his chin down, glowers harder, leans in closer. “It malfunctioned instead. Do you know what happened _instead_ of your damn scanner blowing itself up?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Of course you don’t. If you did, you would know what kind of trouble I’m in, what kind of trouble _we’re_ in, and you would know why I’m so _fucking_ _pissed_. You would know why you have to keep on top of the lists of recalled equipment, and why you _always_ double-check anything you’re assigned just in case your supervisor is a fucking idiot likes yours is.” He’s growling, now, and usually this kind of raw intimidation doesn’t work but the other is leaning back against the wall, Alex’s face or the guard's lack of experience or his own assuredly jumbled thoughts enough to leave him trembling in visible panic against the support.

“You would know,” Alex finishes, “why you know my _name_ when my closest friends don’t.” He watches the other blink, watches the dawn of realization brighten his features; it would be funny, probably, were he not so _pissed_. “You _stole my memories_.”

The guard blinks, startled out of his introspective refactoring and into a reaction by this statement. “What?” He shakes his head, his forehead creasing. “No, no way, how could I have done that?”

“I didn’t say you _meant_ to.” Alex leans back, a little, but the resonance of his voice in his chest keeps righteous fury radiating hot through his veins. He likes it. It’s better than panic. “It’s fine though,” he says, drawling the word into such intense sarcasm even the other’s blank grey stare won’t miss it. “You gave me some of yours too. It’s a fair trade, don’t you think?”

“ _What_?” First shock, then skepticism, then disbelief; Alex can watch the emotions flicker over the other’s face, can see frustration finally settle into creases in the corners of his eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous, how could you--”

“Outdated equipment,” Alex growls. “You won’t notice memories you don’t have anymore. Remember your home?”

That gets him a frown, an eyeroll of such intense condescension Alex nearly hits him just on principle. “Of course I do,” the other says, snapping the words with another indication of that surprising backbone. “It’s sixteen blocks away, to the north, down Ravenswood--”

“I didn’t say _where_ ,” Alex bites off. “I said _your home_. What does it _look_ like?” Then, without waiting for visible confusion to spread over the other’s features as he reaches for memories he doesn’t have: “It’s a one bedroom studio apartment, clean, with just a few pictures of your family on the desk and hanging on the walls. You keep your antique books in alphabetical order on the bookshelf and your spices arranged by color.” It’s easy to describe; Alex can see the image in his head as clearly as if it’s his own apartment he’s seeing, with the faint blue glow of three computer monitors and the tangle of wires along the wall instead of the anachronism of paper books and a fullsize oven. “You have a dresser for pants and a closet for shirts, though those are all t-shirts, you know you could put those in the dresser, right?” He’s getting a blank stare, can see grey eyes going wider and more frightened as he continues; it’s enough, at least, to have chased away the initial disbelief. “I know what your _home_ looks like and couldn’t remember my own name, and you called me what only my parents _ever_ called me and I bet wouldn’t recognize your apartment if you walked yourself right to it. You jumbled our memories, you _idiot_ , and we need to leave _right now_ before someone comes to investigate.”

“It doesn’t matter to me,” the other says, though he sounds uncertain and looks more so. “ _You’re_ the criminal, I was just doing my job.”

“You think the Security Office will care?” Alex asks, shoving up off the floor to balance on legs that get steadier the longer he stands. “You have my memories in your head. They’ll show up on any scan, and I wouldn’t bet the merit of your explanation against what the scan shows. Even if they let you go after that, you won’t have the option to get the ones back that I have in _my_ head.” He shoves a hand through his hair, tries not to think about how odd his fingers feel or how strangely short his hair is as it settles against the back of his neck. “You’re going to come with me instead.”

“I am?” the guard asks. He looks horrified at the idea, his face so wide-open afraid of the possibility that some of Alex’s ire gives way to a brief burst of amusement.

“Yeah.” Alex considers the jumble he has left of his memories, decides he can backtrack himself out of the facility the same way he got in without relying on information he doesn’t have anymore. “'Cause I can get us straightened back into ourselves. Probably. What’s your name?”

The other is watching him, his forehead creased and mouth drawing into a frown. “Tristan.”

“Come with me, _Tristan_ ,” Alex orders, adopting a tone of dominance so absolute the statement is a command and not a request. It’s enough to pull the other to his feet before he thinks of it, and that’s enough for Alex to brace a hand against his shoulder so he can keep the other moving with him instead of bolting. “First we’re going to get out of here.”


	2. Chapter 2

“We have a problem.”

It’s an obvious statement, Alex knows, but it hasn’t been said yet, at least not in so many words. They’ve had other things to worry about in the process of backtracking Alex’s path into the facility, hurrying in spite of Tristan’s insistence that “I’m the only guard, I would know if there were anyone else,” because obviously the amount to which Alex can trust that the other knows what he’s doing falls somewhere between _not at all_ and _fucking christ what a goddamn idiot_ , neither of which offer sufficient reassurance for Alex to take him at his word. So they hurry out of the hallways, and through the back door with the touchy alarm that responds just as well to Alex’s code override entry as it did on his way in, and then they’re out in the streets and losing themselves in the crowd while Alex tries to decide what to do.

It takes him five minutes just to calm himself down, and another ten to work through the burn of fury in his veins at the _injustice_ of it all, at how unfair it is that this should happen to him when he knows enough to be intelligent and to be careful. Finally he reacquaints himself with his usual cynicism, with the comfortable awareness that no one, least of all the world, owes him anything, that the only person he can really count on is himself. It’s a comfort, in a strange way -- after all, Alex trusts his own skills more than he trusts anything else -- and by the time he makes his declaration he feels very nearly calm.

“What happened, exactly?” Tristan asks, his voice quivering with what Alex suspects is the trailing edge of shock. It’s been long enough since they left the facility behind that Alex is surprised at this proof of lingering emotion, but then, judging from how young the other looks -- probably somewhere in his late teens, although the white-gold weight of the hair down his back might be stripping years from his appearance -- and his obvious complete inexperience with basic tools like memory scanners, Tristan doesn’t have much experience with this kind of thing in the real world.

So “You jumbled our memories,” Alex says, somewhat more gently than he would have to someone else: his voice is only sandpaper rough instead of a shout. He feels this is something to be applauded. “Mixed them up and redistributed them at random. I have a whole handful of yours and I sincerely hope you have the ones I’m missing; if you _wiped_ a chunk of my memories and I can’t get it back I’m going to be a lot angrier than I am already.”

“No,” Tristan says, sounding uncertain but obviously secure enough to speak up even in the face of Alex’s none-too-happy tone. “I think I have them. Some of them, anyway.”

“You’d better have _all_ of them,” Alex insists, even though there’s no way for Tristan to know if he does or not, even though Alex won’t notice the lack even if they swapped back right now. It’s hard to miss something you can’t remember having. “I was _using_ my mind for something, unlike you. What the fuck possessed you to use that damn scanner?”

“I keep telling you, I didn’t know,” Tristan says, his voice dipping low as he hunches forward. When Alex looks at him his head is bowed, the angle of his shoulders casting his face in shadow. He’s not looking at Alex. “I showed up this morning and got it as part of my uniform. We used to practice with them, back at the Academy.”

“Of course you did,” Alex grates. “I’m sure they worked perfectly well against training dummies. The Academy doesn’t care much about the damage you might do to one of their androids.” He goes on speaking without waiting for a reply. “Probably saves them some expense, too, using recalled materials for training. As if they have any lack of funding.”

“I don’t--”

“Strange,” Alex says, speaking louder to cut off Tristan’s half-formed sentence before it can gain traction. “Really _bizarre_ , how training a bunch of kids with outdated equipment doesn’t prepare them for reality. Not that I guess the Academy cares all that much about shorting out anyone who might be on the wrong end of a scan.” Alex reaches up to the back of his ear and rubs idly against the port resting just behind the metal of his topmost earring. He can’t feel anything with just his fingertips, but there’s a phantom tingle along his spine, self-awareness of what he’s touching prickling under his skin in spite of the lack of any actual input.

“It killed someone,” he says in a deliberately level tone calculated to horrify Tristan the more with what _could_ have happened than what did. “Back when the Office was testing the extent of the problem. They had a whole bunch of inmates test it to figure out what was going wrong. Usually the scanner shorted itself out, but then they tried it on one woman and the fuse didn’t blow like it was supposed to.”

“No way,” Tristan says, his voice trembling in the back of his throat in the odd, low tone people always take when they’re whispering about the Security Office. “I never saw any records like that.”

“They’re secure files,” Alex tells him in more normal tones. Whispers are the fastest way to draw unwanted attention; better to look like, sound like you’re having a perfectly normal conversation than to indulge in the ducked heads and hissing voices of something Dangerous. “Not even very well-hidden, honestly, anyone with any programming background could get in to look at them. But it’s enough to keep out _legal_ searches.” He drawls the word into a bite, gives it all the condescending dismissal he can muster. “I’m sure _you_ never did see anything about it. The point is,” with an edge, again, cutting the shape of the words to knives on his tongue as he glances sideways, “we were _lucky_.”

“I didn’t know,” Tristan says again, still without looking up. His shoulders are hunched in around his ears; Alex can see his cheeks flushing with color that looks like anger and is probably the threat of tears. “How was I supposed to know, they didn’t _tell_ me.”

“You _have_ to know,” Alex snaps, and he’s moving without thinking about the scene he’s making, grabbing a fistful of the heavy uniform around Tristan’s shoulders as he turns and shoving the other back against one of the nearby storefronts. The metal rattles as Tristan’s head collides with it, the entire wall vibrating with the impact, but Alex doesn’t look away from the sudden startled attention he’s obtained from the other’s grey eyes. “That’s your responsibility, that’s the world you _live_ in.” Tristan is coloring darker, the red in his cheeks climbing to threaten his eyes with liquid, but Alex doesn’t back away; he twists his hand harder into the fabric, shaking to punctuate his point and rattle Tristan’s shoulders against the wall. “Information is more important to survival than _air_. You can’t just turn away and say your own ignorance doesn’t affect you.” He’s gaining force, gaining volume, his breathing is catching in his chest like this is a real fight and not him yelling at an unresisting form. “You might as well be one of those dummy androids if you’re not going to keep yourself educated.”

“ _Fine_ ,” Tristan says finally, the word rushing past his teeth on an exhale so hard it’s nearly a sob. “I fucked up. Does that help?”

“No!” Alex snaps. “No, it _doesn’t_ help, you still have half my memories and I still have a bunch of yours and _I don’t want them_ , jesus, you have a conscience the size of a fucking continent, it’s exhausting even to _remember_ how many things you feel guilty about. Don’t you question any rules ever?” He lets his hold on Tristan’s shirt go with one last shove and stumbles back a few steps instead of leaning in towards the other’s face. At least Tristan’s holding eye contact, now; he’s staring at Alex, his jaw set with determined composure even as his eyes collect liquid and start to overflow. He drags a sleeve over his face, the movement so rough against the sensitive-swollen skin Alex flinches in sympathetic pain, but when he emerges his jaw is steadier, his eyes are clearer, and he still looks upset but there’s steel behind his gaze, and that’s a relief.

“Fine,” he says again, but he sounds steadier, sounds calmer. It’s good to hear; this will be easier on Alex if the other can hold himself together. “I fucked up and broke us both. Can you fix it?”

Alex takes a breath and lets it out slowly and deliberately so it will carry the tension of anger in his chest with it. Without the strain he can feel the hollow press of fear instead. It’s not a comfort. He turns away from Tristan, back to the steady flood of people along the street; they get a few glances as he looks, but no one cares enough to pay attention for long. He jerks his head in unspoken command, steps forward to blend back into the wave, and Tristan follows a step behind, jogging to catch up and stay in range of Alex’s speech. It’s not until they’re another block away that Alex speaks again.

“I don’t know,” he says. Tristan hisses surprise next to him, turning to stare shock at this clearly unanticipated answer. “Maybe. I hope so.”

Tristan blinks. “What about...if we go to the Security Office, can they--”

“No,” Alex says, fast with rejection of the idea as much as in sincere answer to the question. “The Office would have me as one of their inmates for testing the moment they got a clean scan of the data in my head. You _might_ get off free, after they pulled all the information they could get on my history out of your head, and then only if they decided you weren’t a danger just because of your exposure to my memories.” Alex leaves the alternative of what would happen if they _do_ decide Tristan is a danger unstated; even if he’s been carrying around a stupid amount of faith in what he considers ‘authority,’ everyone knows how the Security Office handles what it considers threats.

“You can’t,” Tristan starts, then stops himself, falling silent as he reframes whatever inanity he intends to offer. “You can’t talk like that.”

Alex cuts his eyes sideways at the other. Tristan’s not watching him; he’s looking at the passersby, his head ducked down so he can hide behind his hair as if he’s afraid of being seen, as if the pale length of the hair halfway down his back isn’t enough to draw the attention of anyone who cared. His shoulders are hunched, his mouth twisting on what looks like legitimate fear; it’s a strange reaction to see in someone so close to adulthood as makes no difference.

“I can,” Alex tells him, and his words are a little gentler, now, than he intended them to be. There’s still no softness, but the active bite under them has eased enough to make space for passable neutrality. “Everyone does. Everyone _knows_ how the Office operates, I’m just putting words to what they’re all thinking.”

“I’m not thinking it,” Tristan says, but it’s quiet enough that Alex can ignore him, can pretend he didn’t hear the near-sullen edge of Tristan’s tone under the words. They keep walking for another few blocks in silence, Alex listening for the pattern of Tristan’s footfalls coming close at his heels to make sure the other’s still there without needing to turn around.

Finally Tristan clears his throat as if to speak. Alex doesn’t turn at first, but the silence goes long, and finally he glances back to see Tristan watching him as if waiting for some kind of confirmation of Alex’s attention. He looks relieved at Alex’s raised eyebrow, a little of the tension in his expression fading, and when he speaks to ask “Where are we going?” it’s in the deliberately chipper tone of someone trying very hard to ignore the last few minutes of conversation.

“My place,” Alex says, looking away from the anxious friendliness written all over Tristan’s expression. “If I can sort things out I’m going to need my computers to do it. Besides, I’m sure the memories you stole from me could take you there if you tried. Kinda stupid to attempt secrecy at this point, isn’t it?”

It’s almost a joke. Tristan smiles. Alex doesn’t.


	3. Chapter 3

“Don’t touch anything,” is all Alex says by way of introduction as he unlocks the front door to his apartment with the fingerprint scanner and leads the way into the dimly illuminated interior. There’s a motion sensor by the door, awaiting a sweep of his hand to brighten the room that he doesn’t bother giving; there’s no need for it, when he knows his way across the clutter on the floor by heart and when leaving them in the dark will increase Tristan’s discomfort. He knows he’s being petty. He’ll feel bad about that when he has his memories back. “Shut the door and sit down.”

“Okay,” Tristan says, so immediately obedient that Alex has a pang of guilt, but he doesn’t hesitate in following his memorized route across the floor. He can trust his feet to lead him through the room even if his memories are still a tangle, and when he reaches out for the light on the desk his fingers find the activation panel at the edge on his first try.

“There’s open ports on a couple of the projects around,” Alex says, still without looking back over his shoulder. He can remember the sight of them, can picture the raw ends of metal fraying into the air, and whatever else he’s missing from his head he can _definitely_ remember the unpleasant jolt of electricity he received during previous projects, before he got good enough and careful enough to stop shocking himself every few hours. “Don’t fuck with them.”

“On the security scanner override and the keypad modification,” Tristan offers by way of response, the words as irritatingly familiar on his tongue as if he’s said them every day of his life. If Alex didn’t know better he might even believe Tristan knew what he was talking about. “I remember.”

“I want those memories _back_ ,” Alex growls without turning around, and kicks his desk chair back far enough that he can drop to the edge of it. He shoves the weight of his hair off his face as he leans in over the desk and makes a face at the shadows the motion casts. “Give me your hair tie.”

“What?” Tristan sounds lost, disoriented, like he’s as off-kilter in this conversation as Alex has felt since he blinked himself back to consciousness. “What do you need it for?”

“To tie my hair back,” Alex says, with the patient condescension one would take when talking to a child or to a particularly slow android. “I can’t see when it’s in my face and I don’t remember where I left mine.” It’s something of a stretch: he _can_ remember, or at least can pull up the visual of dropping a pack of elastic bands into a drawer, but he doesn’t want to take the time to dig through his surroundings with the embarrassing lack of knowledge he knows he’d demonstrate, and Tristan owes him, or at least is going to owe him by the time this is sorted out.

There’s silence for a moment, a pause long enough that Alex thinks the other might be pouting, or glaring and waiting for him to turn and see. He’s just about to withdraw his expectant hand when fingers press against his palm and curl into a grip more insistent than friendly.

“Look,” Tristan says, and Alex looks up in spite of his intention not to. Tristan’s staring at him, his brows drawn together on frustration and his mouth set into a frown. His hair is loose around his shoulders, falling  down his back now that it’s freed from the elastic. “I used outdated equipment. I know I did. That was my mistake.”

“Fucking right it was,” Alex says, or starts to say, because Tristan is still talking, steadily enough that even without an increase in volume his voice cuts clearly over Alex’s.

“But you were there to steal data off the banks I was supposed to be guarding.” Tristan’s frowning harder. It’s a strangely intent expression on a face that until now has looked alternately panicked and afraid; Alex revises his estimate on the other’s age, jumps him up by another few years to make space for the set of his jaw, for the resolution in his eyes. “Would you be this angry with me if I had used the scanner I was supposed to and brought you in for questioning by the Office?”

“Yeah,” Alex snaps, because it’s easy to be contradictory and he’s never been very good at thinking before he speaks. He’s sure in practice he wouldn’t still be thinking of the guard with the pale hair at all, would have written him off as bad luck while he faced down the far greater problems processing at the Security Office would present to him. He wouldn’t have the attention to spare for much of anything beyond trying to keep his mouth shut while he dealt with whatever the Office did to him. The thought of it even in the space of his own head, aided by his unfortunately clear recollection of what happened to past friends that were unlucky enough to get caught, is enough to crush out the bite of fire behind his words, to blow his eyes wider on instinctive fear of the idea alone. Alex tries to look down, to look away, to hide his involuntary reaction, but Tristan is still staring at him, and he can’t quite manage the backbone required to look away from those suddenly-focused eyes.

“You’re a liar,” Tristan says, smooth and certain, and Alex wants to protest that too but he has even less basis for the claim. Tristan sighs, and ducks his head, and some of the weird tension holding Alex’s attention where it is dissipates. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to like me, I don’t have to like you, but neither of us is going to leave until we get this sorted out.”

“You had better not leave,” Alex says, fast with panic at the idea. “You’re taking my _memories_ with you, I _need_ those.”

“And I need mine,” Tristan says, although Alex rather doubts this is as true as it is for him; there’s sentiment in the unfamiliar pieces of another life in his head, loving parents and the laughter of children and the pride in becoming recently independent, but nothing that seems as immediately critical as his own hard-won knowledge of computer circuitry and programming languages and security vulnerabilities. Tristan might _want_ his memories back -- and Alex certainly doesn’t want to hold onto them -- but Alex _needs_ his, he can’t proceed in his current life without them.

Tristan is still talking. “You don’t have to waste your time just to be rude to me.” He lets Alex’s hand go, leaving behind the circle of elastic the other demanded. “Trust me, I’ll be sure not to forget you dislike me just because you stop giving regular reminders.”

“Oh good,” Alex bites off, tasting irritation sour on his tongue to match the bitter awareness of the accuracy of Tristan’s statement. When he pulls his hair back he’s rougher than he should be; the force aches over his scalp, dragging pain across his hairline as he snaps the elastic around the short ends of hair he’s collected in his fingers. “Maybe you’re not as naïve as you look.”

Tristan doesn’t rise to the bait. He just turns away, shoulders hunching against his uniform until it falls into ill-fitting lines over his shoulders and across the curve of his back. Alex watches him move towards the couch in the corner, one of the only empty spaces in the room; his loose hair ghosts in the air, so fine the wind of his motion is enough to catch it into waves behind him. Alex looks away as Tristan turns to sit on the couch and is dragging the dull silver square of a powered-down keyboard free from a precarious pile of equipment by the time the other has turned to look back at him.

“I’m going to need to design the sorting method for our memories from scratch,” Alex says aloud, self-consciousness at the press of an unfamiliar stare at his shoulders enough to draw the words involuntarily from his lips. His spine is prickling with adrenaline, his skin aching discomfort with the edgy attention of having someone at his back, but he doesn’t turn around, doesn’t admit that Tristan’s position behind him is making him nervous. “I heard of a guy who had this happen to him with a jury-rigged memory scanner from a decade back or so, but that was more selective amnesia than an actual memory swap.” Alex balances the keyboard at the edge of the table, reaches to lift one of the piles of equipment and half-empty storage containers off to set on the floor. Without the makeshift wall of clutter the desk light radiates out farther, illuminating more of the room than just the narrow strip of space right in the center of the desk. “And I can’t remember what he did to fix himself up afterwards.”

“He plugged directly into the scanner’s backup files,” Tristan offers, the information in his voice so unexpected that Alex jumps and nearly turns before he remembers he’s supposed to be working, is supposed to be ignoring the other’s presence. “The scanner took a download of the memories it had pulled from him before it short-circuited.” He sounds vague, a little bit dreamy, like he’s reading from the page of a book or reciting a poem. “The scanner burnt out with the electricity draw, though. It was unusable afterwards.”

“Yeah.” Alex taps his keypad to turn on the computer built into the underside of the table, holds the contact long enough for the fingerprint lock to release. “And _you’re_ the storage for my memories right now. I might not like you but I’m not particularly excited about frying your brain just so I can retrieve the pieces of my head you stole.”

“Thanks,” Tristan says drily.

“Don’t take it personally,” Alex spits. He taps open the editing software and brings up one of his previously-abandoned software projects. “I’d be just as likely to burn myself out as retrieve my thoughts from your head. And I don’t want to be carrying your ideas in my memories for any length of time either.”

“Still.” Tristan sounds less hurt by this statement than he should be. “Regardless of the reasoning, I’m grateful.”

“Yeah.” Alex copies the file to a new name, considers the screen for a moment while he thinks through the next steps. He’ll need to put together the sorting method to separate his own memories from Tristan’s and run it on both of them simultaneously, to filter and swap them back at the same time. Without any kind of a separate storage device, it’ll need to be done in real-time, and that requires... “This isn’t going to work.”

“That was fast,” Tristan says. There’s the sound of the couch moving, the other getting to his feet before scuffing steps approach where Alex is seating at the desk. “How do you know so quickly?”

“I don’t mean the idea won’t work,” Alex says, kicking his chair back so suddenly Tristan has to stumble to keep from getting hit. Alex looks up through the shadows of the poorly-lit room, sighs at the confusion on the other’s face. “I need something to work from. I can start on the programming now, but I’m going to need…” He can see the image in his head, can reach for the word that’s always been there to describe it...and comes up short, his speech stuttering to a halt on the absence of assumed knowledge. “Shit.”

“What?” Tristan is looking confused at the hesitation in Alex’s words. It’s more frustrating than it reasonably should be. “What do you need?”

“It has two ports,” Alex says, gesturing wide in the air as if to leave afterimages of visuals in the wake of his fingers. “To connect two separate things. I have one but it’s not the right kind, not for the memory storage we need to be doing.” He waves his hand again, his lost vocabulary forming shapes in the air. “ _Shit_.”

“An interface?” Tristan asks.

Alex snaps his fingers, points at the other. “That’s it.” He waves a hand at the monitor in front of him. “I can work on the program but we won’t be able to do anything with it unless we reconnect our minds like we accidentally did before.”

Tristan’s forehead is creasing on confusion. “Do we need to go shopping?”

“No,” Alex says, and reaches for the zipper on his pocket. “ _You_ need to go shopping.” There’s a handful of old-fashioned coins weighting his jeans, the anachronism not yet so unusual as to be a tip-off for unlawful activity and still the best way to avoid leaving personal information in the wake of technology purchases. He picks out a handful of the heaviest coins and holds them out until Tristan picks up on his expectant stare and offers his palm to catch them.

“You have all the vocabulary for this kind of thing,” Alex says, pushing a hand through his hair before he remembers it’s tied back. “You won’t be any help getting in my way here. At least you can make yourself useful by doing the grunt work while I start working on the program.” Alex pushes a lock of loosened hair behind his ear, leans in over the desk again as he starts to edit the program’s library headers. “The longer we wait the trickier it will be to tell whose memories are whose. Every hour will just make my job harder.”

“But I don’t--”

Alex lifts a hand to wave Tristan’s protests away without turning around. “Get the fuck out of here,” he says to the glow of the screen in front of him. “Go put my memories to good use.”

He doesn’t turn around at the quiet behind him, at the hesitation that says Tristan isn’t sure if he’s going to obey or not. He waits until he hears the other turn, until he’s moved across the floor and opened the door; even once the lock clicks shut, Alex takes a moment before he looks back over his shoulder to make sure Tristan is actually gone. It’s only once he’s seen that his apartment is his own again that he lets the tension drain out of his shoulders and groans frustration at the ceiling.

“This is going to be a pain,” he informs the shadows overhead.

The empty room swallows the sound of his voice.


	4. Chapter 4

“I’m _sorry_ ,” Tristan says again, just at Alex’s elbow. “I told you I didn’t know what I was getting.”

“I knew I shouldn’t have trusted you to do anything,” Alex snaps, hunching his shoulders as if to chase away the distraction of bright hair in his periphery. “It was too much to hope that I would have swapped memories with someone actually _useful_ , I guess.”

“You gave me a bunch of vague descriptions!” Tristan protests. “What was I supposed to do with that? I’ve never touched any of this stuff before.”

“I can’t believe you haven’t even bought a VR toy,” Alex says, glancing at the flickering hologram displays at the streetside shops before dismissing them as overpriced, or overengineered, or otherwise not the right option for what they need. “There’s a fundamental difference between plugging two people into a separate shared program and hooking them up to directly to each other. Do you know _anything_ about technology, or do you just buy whatever shit you need ready-made in the custom shops?”

Tristan’s laugh is sharp at the edges, more raw than actually amused; when Alex glances up from the tangle of his loosening hair Tristan’s not looking at him, is watching the street in front of them instead of trying to make eye contact. His mouth is set into a smile without any humor under it; it makes him look older again, grants him that strange maturity he seems to collect whenever his mouth hasn’t gone unconsciously soft.

“I don’t know how many of my memories you ended up with but I’m not as well-off as you’re assuming,” he says, still looking over the motion of the crowd instead of at Alex. “Maybe if I was working for the Office I’d have a higher pay grade but--”

“Shut up,” Alex tells him, and reaches out to press a hand to the back of Tristan’s head and shove him forward. “If you talk a little louder everyone will know you want to work for the Office and we’ll have a real crisis on our hands.”

Tristan cuts his eyes at him, his lips dragging into a frown for a moment, but then he ducks his head, and if his mouth clings to the curve of a pout his voice is softer too, an undertone instead of the ordinary conversational range he hit initially.

“I don’t have any custom equipment,” he says, glancing sideways to glare sincerity at Alex. His eyes catch the diffuse sunlight reflected off the sides of buildings before filtering down to the street, turn silver and almost colorless under the force of the light. “I can’t _afford_ it. Do you know how hard it is to get modifications installed on a standard salary?”

“No,” Alex admits immediately, easily. “I’ve never tried it.”

Tristan rolls his eyes. “Just stole all the ones you wanted, did you?”

“I made them.” Alex says it fast, as smoothly as if the answer was always that simple, as if he didn’t spend weeks agonizing over whether to use the first modification he made for himself, didn’t spend days running test after test after test before he managed to summon the nerve to actually plug into it. Tristan’s frown evaporates, his mouth going soft again as his eyes go wider with a flicker of respect, and Alex goes on talking, holding the other’s gaze and trusting in his peripheral awareness to keep him from walking directly into a Officer or the side of a building. “It took me months to make the first one and longer to test it. I rewired and programmed the whole thing by hand and when I plugged into it the entire thing exploded under my hands.”

“Jesus,” Tristan breathes.

“Lucky for me it wasn’t the other end of the connection that fried,” Alex says, and he does look away, then, because even with years to soften them the memories are still too vivid to easily talk about and because the rising sympathy in Tristan’s face isn’t something he wants to see. “The second one only took me a couple of weeks.” He lifts a hand to his ear, flicks the topmost earring on the right side. He can feel the vibration in the metal in the backs of his teeth, in the faint ache at the top of his spine. “Still use it sometimes.”

“But.” Tristan blinks. His eyelashes are pale as his hair, almost invisible in the morning-bright sunlight, but Alex can see how long they are in the shadows they cast against Tristan’s cheeks, an afterimage of existence rather than the original. “But homemade modifications are dangerous, they’re illegal, that--”

“They’re not,” Alex tells him. “There’s nothing anywhere in the security records that make them illegal. The Office doesn’t care if a stupid kid blows himself up, I guarantee that. All they care about is whether the mods ‘demonstrate a technical knowledge that presents a threat to the government.’” He coughs a laugh without any amusement to the sound at all. “But by the time they get to analyzing you at that level, you’ve already been detained and there’s not much that will make your situation worse.”

“But they’re still dangerous,” Tristan breathes, softly enough no one else will be able to hear but with more than enough shocked horror in his tone for Alex to catch. “You--what if the second one had…”

“I was ready to shut myself down when I powered up the first one,” Alex says to the street. He can remember it still, the flash of blinding light as electricity arced, the blue afterimages that clung to his eyes for hours, the way he had unplugged himself with uncannily steady hands and pushed the whole thing away before twisting sideways to vomit horror over the floor. “I had already decided the risk was worth it.”

Tristan’s laugh is high, incredulous, grating over the back of his throat into something that would be almost musical if it didn’t sound like the edge of hysteria. “So now you just throw your life in as the counterweight to whatever project you’re taking on? Don’t you ever recalculate the value of it?”

“I do,” Alex says. He expects anger to be forming in his chest but it’s not; there’s nothing but calm, the same all-over acceptance he felt after the first mistake, after he woke up from a shivering night on the floor and found the sun still able to creep through the half-drawn blinds on his one high window, found the daylight still steaming in to turn the grey towers of the city to radiant silver with the dawn. “It’s still worth it.” He looks away from the street again, turns his head from the crowd; there’s another shop around the corner, his memory echoes tell him, one of his favorite to frequent even if he can’t remember the name right now.

“It’s a hell of a lot safer to buy pieces and then repurpose their functionality,” he admits, tilting his head to the side to get Tristan’s attention before he turns to move towards the shop. Tristan falls into step with him almost seamlessly; for all the eye-catching bright of his hair, the way he moves is less self-consciously awkward than Alex had been afraid of. Were it not for the uniform he’s still wearing he might almost be able to fit in with the people Alex usually spends his free time with.

“And I’m better at it now,” Alex says, speaking more softly now as they approach the front of the shop and the hum of the crowd around them fades. “At making my own equipment. I’m _good_ at it. The things I program malfunction a lot less often than the glued-together shit you can spend a fortune on in the stores, and they do twice as much, even if they don’t look as nice.” He reaches for the door, tugs the weight of it open; air conditioning hits them both in a gust of wind, ruffling Alex’s hair and earning hunched shoulders from Tristan. It tastes like metal when the first rush clears, the air clean and cool but absent any of the perfumes the fancier stores like to infuse the air with; Alex prefers it, even if there’s an unpleasant suggestion of dust and disuse under the smell. It feels more sincere this way, like it truly belongs in the city rather than attempts to disavow all connections with the world outside the front doors.

“Afternoon,” the cashier says, the vague greeting offered to all customers without bothering with the effort of looking up. That’s good too, that saves Alex the trouble of trying to dodge overly-helpful marketing tactics. He ignores the meaningless comment to head instead for the back shelf of the store and the familiar shapes of irregular metal in minimal packaging.

“We want something with two ports,” he says in a range for Tristan’s benefit rather than the cashier’s. His hands come up of their own accord, sketch out the outline of the image he can see in his mind. “Nothing for a monitor or an external data bank, that’s the wrong kind of connection.” He picks up one of the cases, eyes the image on the side consideringly. “Like this one.”

“Is that the right kind?” Tristan asks doubtfully. He reaches over Alex’s shoulder, touches a finger to the label printed in clear font along the bottom edge of the box: _real-time data merger_. “Don’t we want one with data separation instead?”

“Beats me,” Alex admits, setting the case back on the shelf. “You’re the one who remembers the terminology.” It’s frustrating even to put words to that, when he can remember hours spent pouring over owner’s manuals and catalogs filled with pieces he couldn’t afford. But when he reaches for the words themselves they slip through his fingers, leave him with the cold of unfamiliarity instead of the comfort of years-old acquaintances. He reaches for another box, checking the details this time: _data separation_ , like Tristan said, and the picture on the side looks better, too, the shape of the plugs and the design of the main module closer to his mental image than the first. “What about this one?”

In the end it is the second interface they get, after Alex has rejected the appearance of four boxes and Tristan has spent ten minutes painstakingly pouring over the microscopic text for the specifications of the interface itself. The cashier rings the price up more slowly than she needs to, and with a lot more smiling from under her lashes at Tristan than is necessary, but Alex doesn’t care much; she ends up being so busy attempting a flirtation with Tristan that she barely glances at him. By the time they leave the shop Tristan is flushed with embarrassment and Alex is so amused that when Tristan groans “I thought she’d never let us go,” it’s easier to laugh at him than to scowl.

Alex has always felt better when he has the solution to a problem in his own hands.


	5. Chapter 5

“Hey.”

Alex speaks without looking up from what he’s doing. He’s having a hard enough time keeping the idea of the program he’s trying to write in his head; he’d prefer to keep his eyes on what he’s doing rather than attempting to make unnecessary eye contact with the only other occupant of the room. Unfortunately, Tristan doesn’t work through this same logic, or he’s just distracted by all the things he’s not allowed to touch, because Alex is met with nothing but silence after his initial sally into communication.

Alex frowns at the computer monitor. “ _Hey_. Kid. Blondie. Pretty boy.”

That gets him a huff, at least, bruised feelings making themselves known in a too-hard exhale. “You know my name.”

Alex rolls his eyes expressively for the uncaring audience of the text in front of him. “ _Tristan_ ,” he says, drawling the name sing-songy just to make sure it comes off as an insult too. “Get over here, I need your help.”

Apparently it’s the second statement that does the trick, at least more so than the less-than-flattering summons. Tristan appears as if he’s teleported across the mess on the floor, hovering so enthusiastically he intrudes into Alex’s light for a moment. “What do you need?” he asks as a lead-in, sounding precisely as unbearably excited as Alex should have expected he would. “How can I help?”

“Sit down,”Alex says, glaring up through his hair at the overbearing excitement clear over Tristan’s face. “It’s behind you,” he growls when Tristan turns to blink confusion at the mess of furniture and stacks of computer components in search of a chair. “Under the blue boxes.” Tristan unearths the seat indicated, picks it up and carries it the few inches to the desk; Alex is briefly grateful to be spared the screech of metal-on-metal as the chair pulls over the floor, but it is, thankfully, only a moment of weakness before he’s right back to general irritation with the existence of the world at large and with Tristan in particular.

“How much do you know about programming?” Alex asks, still paying more attention to the computer screen than to Tristan.

He can hear the hiss of almost-panic Tristan makes, the telltale sound of someone put on the spot for something about which they know nothing. “Uh.”

Alex rolls his eyes. “I don’t mean _you_ you,” he says, and looks back to meet the alarm in Tristan’s grey gaze. “I mean _me_ , my memories that you _stole_.”

“I didn’t--”

“Whatever,” Alex says, cutting off Tristan’s rebuttal with a flippant wave of his hand through the air. “Look. I know what I _want_ to do, but I can’t remember the structure of the language itself. So I’m going to tell you what to do, and you’re going to use my memories and actually write the code. Correctly, hopefully, so we don’t both blow ourselves up in the process of testing this out.”

Tristan looks horrified. His eyes are going wider as he stares at Alex; Alex is fairly sure he hasn’t even looked at the computer monitor at all. “I...don’t think I _can_.”

“Well I sure can’t,” Alex tells him, picking up the touchpad and shoving it against Tristan’s chest. “So let’s hope you can or we’ll be right back where we started. We don’t have time for you to have a crisis of faith about your insecurities about programming right now, I just need you to do this one thing.”

“I’ll try,” Tristan says, still sounding so deeply uncertain Alex can hear his voice wobbling on the words. But he takes the touchpad, and turns it over to set across his lap, and when he sets his fingers against the keys it’s with a rush of an exhale that sounds like close enough to determination for Alex to deal with, even if it’s less than reassuring. “What do you need?”

“Here.” Alex reaches towards the computer monitor, gesturing at the notes he’s made for himself in the middle of the existing code. “We need to add a way for the interface to filter out your memories from mine. There should be something indicating where they originated from that we can do a search for.”

“User ID is coded into the first twelve digits of the file name,” Tristan says before blinking and looking as shocked as if he’d just spoken in another language. “It should be the same code built into the ID chips.” He frowns. “There’s no way to know your own, though.”

“There is,” Alex says shortly. It’s a lengthy process, a matter of breaking into the main Security databases and searching across multiple filters to narrow down the IDs to just one value, but it’s one of the first major projects he did, the first project any serious hacker has to do to keep their tracks well-covered. “It’s--”

“40e18fad9927,” Tristan recites.

Alex shuts his mouth and turns his attention to glaring at Tristan thoroughly enough that the other cringes back in his seat. “Sure,” he grates, biting off the word against the back of his teeth. “I guess you _would_ know.”

Tristan flinches. “Sorry,” he says. “I don’t _want_ to remember your ID. But you knew it, so--”

“Now _you_ do.” Alex can hear the bite on his tone, doesn’t bother attempting to smooth it to gentleness. “Whatever.” He gestures to the monitor again, easing the strain of dealing with Tristan with the comfortable familiarity of a screen full of code. “Since we have my ID, we can just do a check on the code at the beginning of the file name to see if it matches. If it does, I’ll take it. If it doesn’t, it’s yours.”

Tristan swallows. “That sounds easy enough.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Alex informs him. “But that’s the first step, and I can’t remember the commands to write it. I need you to code in the check of the files as we run through them.”

Tristan blinks, looking wide-eyed and faintly alarmed. “But I--”

“Stop complaining,” Alex tells him shortly. “There should be a command to cycle through the input as it’s received and another to check it against the code, which you can just enter in manually. That’s all I need you to write.”

Tristan’s forehead creases. “Like a while loop?”

“Sure,” Alex says. “I don’t _know_ , Tristan, that’s why _you’re holding the keyboard_.”

Tristan frowns. “There’s no need to get huffy,” he says, but he’s bowing his head over the keyboard anyway, pushing a loose lock of hair behind his ear as he settles his fingers onto the keys. “I just want to make sure I’m doing it right.”

“Just _do_ it,” Alex says, and Tristan frowns but doesn’t look up, and after a moment he starts typing, the symbols forming on the monitor with enough speed that the strain of uncertainty along Alex’s spine eases and lets him relax for a moment. He still doesn’t recognize the commands Tristan is typing -- there’s nothing in his head for him to compare them against, after all -- but it _looks_ right, the outline of the program forming on the screen has the shape he expects it to. It’s enough to blow a sigh of relief from his lungs, enough to tilt his head back against the back of the chair for a breath of satisfying relief.

Alex lets Tristan continue for few minutes. The soft rhythm of fingertips hitting the touchpad is soothing, and he’s exhausted in an all-over way out of proportion to the relatively early hour of the day; it’s pleasant to let his mind wander for a bit, to let himself just exist in the shape of his body, even if that shape feels vaguely uncanny in comparison to the mess of Tristan’s memories in his mind. By the time he looks up Tristan’s written a handful of lines of code and continues on in the file as Alex leans in to read over what he’s written.

And frowns. “Stop,” he says, and reaches out to smack Tristan’s fingers away from the touchpad without looking. “Stop, what are you _doing_ , you’re not closing any of your statements.” Tristan’s head comes up to focus shock at Alex, but Alex doesn’t look at him; he’s tabbing through the code one-handed, without looking at the keypad still balanced across Tristan’s knees. “You can’t just leave these _open_ , that’s a completely amateur mistake.” He’s adding close characters to each line, the movement rhythmic and as familiar as the pattern of walking; it’s not something he has to think about when he’s coding, the memory of learning this is so far back in his mind he’s scowling with the effort of consciously accessing it. “If you missed one of these in the wrong place it could crash the whole program or completely short out the interface.”

“Sorry,” Tristan protests, petulance lacing shadows over his voice. “I told you I’ve never coded before.”

“Fuck,” Alex says, considering the mess they’ve made of the loop Tristan was writing. He’s added back in the missing close statements but the alignment of the commands is a mess, the whole thing completely unreadable even if the logic is correct. “ _Fuck_.” He highlights the whole chunk of text and deletes it with a swipe of his thumb. “We’re going to have to start over.”

Tristan’s eyes are dark with frustration, his mouth shaky on emotion, but he just nods when Alex glances sideways at him, a dip of his chin that looks oddly confident compared to what Alex has seen from him so far. “Fine,” he says, and reaches for the edge of the keypad. “Tell me what I’m doing wrong and I’ll fix it.”

“No way,” Alex says, and drags the pad free of Tristan’s hold. That gets him open-mouthed confusion, but he barely glances at the other as he settles himself in place with the touchpad pressed against his knees. “There’s too many details, you’ll never get them all right and I don’t have time to teach you to write clean code yourself.” He takes a breath, lets the weight of his inhale settle in his chest as he faces up to the capitulation of the next sentence. Even after bracing himself for it, the words come out sour on his tongue. “You’re going to tell me what to write.”

There’s a beat of absolute silence. Then: “What?” Tristan says, sounding shellshocked.

Alex grits his teeth. “You’re going to tell me,” he says, and tabs himself into a new line in the code, sets his finger over the keys. “I can’t remember the language and you can’t be trusted to write the code. So I’m going to tell you what it needs to do, and you’re going to tell me what to write, and I’ll write the code the way it’s supposed to be written.”

Tristan looks at Alex again; Alex can see the shift of the other’s hair in his periphery, but he doesn’t look up to track the arc of the strands through the air.”That’s going to take a while,” he says, softly, like he’s not sure he wants to be heard.

“It’ll take longer,” Alex agrees. “Longer still if you’re going to complain about it. Start talking.”

He’s expecting Tristan to voice some protest, to frame words around a complaint or a delay or some other reason they can’t start immediately. But Tristan doesn’t put words to any of that; he just takes a deep breath, a long drag of air into his lungs like he’s settling himself, and when he starts to talk it’s with the odd, stilted language of computer code rather than English. Alex makes it through two words before he growls “Slow down, I can’t keep up,” and Tristan retreats to start over, more slowly this time.

It takes four more attempts before Tristan finds the right pace for his speech, and when he does he falls into an odd sing-songy rhythm to it, like he’s fitting the words to the pace of a children’s rhyme to keep himself on-pattern. Alex doesn’t complain about it. It’s soothing in a strange way, like a replacement for the music he usually puts on while he’s coding, and the pace is the right one for him to keep up, just slow enough that he can manage while fast enough that he’s not kept waiting between commands. It absorbs all his attention for the span of the function they’re building, and when Tristan falls silent it takes Alex a moment to realize why. It’s not until he blinks himself out of his brief fugue that he realizes the section is done, that the shape of the code on the screen looks _right_ even before he’s leaned in to read the text itself.

“Is it better?” Tristan asks from over his shoulder, while Alex is reading over code that feels like the odd, nostalgic familiarity of a forgotten childhood memory.

“It’ll work,” is the closest he lets himself come to _good job_. Alex looks down at his hands, flexes his fingers unnecessarily before aligning them over the keys again; it’s a better focus for his attention than looking up and realizing that Tristan is watching him in expectation of some kind of follow-up response. “Let’s do the next one.”

It’s easier to find the rhythm for the work the second time; Tristan drops into the pattern without needing to be told, and Alex loses himself in the soothing pattern of his fingers pressing input against the touchpad. He’s grateful for the attention the task demands as much for the distraction as for the comfort it provides.


	6. Chapter 6

Tristan clears his throat, coughs delicately. “You know,” he says from his position at Alex’s elbow. “I am not finding the thought of this particularly reassuring.”

Alex doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to; Tristan’s just putting words to the concern hanging between them, the obvious, instinctive panic that comes with looking at an interface that has been pulled open and reprogrammed to do something far different than what was originally intended. Alex doesn’t know if it will work, and worse he’s not sure it will fail safely like it’s supposed to; there’s no good way to test it, not without a handful of suicidal human subjects or at least a full-spec android with a human-equivalent brain capacity, and with only a few dozen of those available in the entire city and all owned by the Office, humans off the street would be cheaper to come by.

“We don’t have a choice,” he says without looking to meet Tristan’s gaze. “It’s not like we can buy something off the shelf to do what we need.”

“Are you sure?” Tristan asks. “Maybe you just haven’t seen them. Swap memories for an hour, kind of thing? I bet it would make first dates a lot more entertaining.”

“That’s a terrible idea,” Alex declares. “You have terrible ideas. You should reconsider ever speaking again.” He takes a deep breath, steadies himself in his mind; when he reaches for the plug on his side of the desk his hand barely shakes at all. “I’m going to do it.”

“What if--”

“Shut up,” Alex says, flipping the plug right-side up so he can fit it into the port behind his ear. “Seriously. Think about taking a vow of silence, it would be better for me at least and probably for everyone else in the world.” The plug fits in easily, clicks into place with the shiver of electricity Alex can feel in his teeth and down the line of his spine; nothing happens, which is good, since nothing’s supposed to until he flips the activation switch. There’s just a purr of potential, possibility crackling through his veins with what could happen, what _should_ happen, what might happen, until his heart is pounding faster with the all-over awareness of existence like it’s compensating for the possibility of very shortly no longer having it.

“Your turn,” Alex says, the words turned inside-out into uncanny resonances in his chest as they convert to data in his head, and he reaches for the plug for the other end of the board. It feels heavier than it should, the weight of it trying to ground out against his fingers and finding no port, and Tristan doesn’t take it right away, just stares at it with an expression like Alex is offering him a lit fuse. Which is, Alex has to admit, not wholly inaccurate in this case.

“Come on,” he says, feeling the words fall flat and emotionless off his tongue. “If we’re going to get back to normal we have to do this.”

“I know,” Tristan says, but he’s still staring at the plug, his eyes dark and shadowed until all Alex can see in them is panic. “I know.”

“Take it,” Alex orders. “Plug yourself in and I’ll do the rest of it.”

Tristan lifts a hand. For a moment Alex thinks he’s going to do it, is going to take the plug as he needs to. Then Alex sees the way his fingers are trembling, the motion clear even in the dim lighting of the room, and he knows what’s coming even before Tristan draws his hand back and manages “I can’t” into the tense expectation in the air.

“For _fuck’s_ sake,” Alex says, anger strong enough to override even the electric hum of the waiting plug in his head, and Tristan talks over him, fast, like speed will make up for his refusal.

“Do it for me,” he says, blurting the words as his hands form into fists at his sides, as his shoulders hunch in with tension that isn’t quite breaking free into a tremor. “I’ll do it, I’ll let you do it, just. I can’t plug it in myself.” He’s gone pale, his face so completely drained of blood he looks almost grey; his mouth is shaking too, his lips quivering around the words, and Alex wants to be angry but with how pale the other is he’s a little bit impressed Tristan is still standing, especially in the face of what is likely the most dangerous thing he’s ever knowingly done.

So: “Fine,” Alex says, voice flatlining to monotone again, and he reaches for Tristan’s shoulder instead of for his hand and drags him forward and around on stumbling feet. Tristan takes an inhale, a choking sound of panic, but Alex ignores it; he’s focused on what he’s doing, on pushing pale hair back from the curve of the other’s ear and holding it there while he brings the plug in closer. Tristan’s tense with fright, his neck straining with adrenaline, but he’s holding still, and that’s all Alex needs from him right now. He brings the plug up, fits it to the port under Tristan’s ear, and when he shoves it’s with the smooth force of certainty, with one easy motion to slot the weight of the connection into place. Tristan’s breath tears out of him, makes the shape of a sob of fright, but Alex is moving already, reaching for the interface still and dormant on the desk. He can’t let himself think about what he’s doing, can’t let himself consider stopping; he just moves, clean and smooth and determined like he decided he would as his fingernail catches at the switch and clicks it to _on_.

Alex’s vision sparks into light. There’s an array of information that splashes over his eyes, his awareness of his immediate surroundings giving way to the cobbled-together program they pieced together; there’s data rushing over him, words and numbers coming too fast to read, too fast to parse, and he thinks it’s going faster and it _is_ going faster, it’s running outside the safeties and the safeties aren’t activating, Tristan’s screaming in a cut-off burst of sound-- and everything goes black, the connection collapsing so abruptly that for a moment Alex thinks he’s passed out again, that maybe this is what dying feels like. But then he blinks, and his overwrought vision starts to piece itself back together, and Tristan gasps an inhale into the silence and Alex takes a breath and tastes metal and smoke on his tongue.

“You alive?” he asks without moving. He’s not sure how he’s still on his feet, is afraid to move in case that abruptly changes; Tristan is definitely not, but the sound of his audible breathing is a good argument for his continuing existence.

“Yeah,” Tristan’s voice says, and Alex tips his head down, carefully, to see the other on his knees and clinging to the edge of the desk. His forehead is pressed against the support of the surface, his shoulders are shaking; Alex can see the panic seizing his fingers hard against the edge of the furniture. “I think.”

“You sound alive.” Alex reaches up to unplug his end of the connection; there’s no hurry, not with the board dark with lack of power and still smoking from blowing itself out the way it was meant to, but he’s pretty sure he’s going to be sitting down soon, and that will be more graceful if he’s not connected to the now-useless construction on the table. “Congratulations.” His knees give way; he manages to fall into his chair instead of to the floor to make his collapse look a little more like a deliberate drop instead of the capitulation of his body to shock. Not that it really matters; Tristan’s not looking at him anyway, has his eyes shut as he holds to the table and does his best to start hyperventilating.

“Don’t freak out on me,” Alex says pointlessly, because he can’t at the moment think what else to say. “That was exactly what it was supposed to do.” He pauses, rephrases. “If it didn’t do what it was supposed to do.”

“It was supposed to _blow up_?” Tristan asks the edge of the table.

“It could have killed us,” Alex says thoughtfully. “So, yeah, I thought programming it to blow itself up before we died was a better option.”

Tristan offers a faint, incoherent whimper of meaningless panic. Alex considers the back of his head, the tangle of his hair, the line of the cord still running from behind his ear up to the board. “Can you unplug yourself?” Tristan shakes his head, a tiny motion that nonetheless manages to offer an entire array of meaning, and Alex leans forward from his chair and braces himself heavily against the table as he reaches for the plug behind Tristan’s ear.

“We’ll have to start over,” he says, still riding the calm before his own panic hits. “Tomorrow, probably, though. You should stop hyperventilating.”

“ _Thanks_ ,” Tristan snaps, voice cracking high and desperate. “I didn’t _realize_.” He shudders as Alex pulls the plug free, the tension tight-wound along his spine jolting the tiny reaction into a wave, and Alex lets the weight of the plug fall from his fingers as his hand starts to tremble in the first rush of delayed-onset adrenaline.

“Okay,” Alex says, leaning back in his chair and tipping his head back to stare at the ceiling. “If you’re going to pass out lie down first or you’ll hurt yourself falling over.” His vision is tunneling, going dark from the outside in; the pressure on his chest is urging him to panic, pushing him towards the gasping inhales Tristan is taking. It takes all his concentration to keep himself breathing slowly. “I’m going to take a few minutes here and not go into shock, so you’re on your own till I can see again.”

“Fuck you,” Tristan says weakly. Alex can hear the rustle of clothing, the faint thud as the other tips sideways to lie on the floor. “This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.”

Alex doesn’t try to argue the point. He doesn’t have the coherency to do a good job at it, and besides, from what he can remember, Tristan’s absolutely right.


	7. Chapter 7

“Alexei?”

The whisper is soft. Alex wouldn’t hear it were it not for the anxiety coursing through him, were it not for the panic of indecision keeping his eyes wide and his heart pounding far too quickly for the pursuit of the sleep he had hoped to attain when he sprawled out over the bed in the corner of the room. But he is awake, wide awake, and has been for so long that even the sound of his given name isn’t enough to work him to true anger around the relief that Tristan is awake too.

“Don’t call me that,” Alex says in an ordinary tone. It feels like a shout in the midnight quiet of the apartment. “What is it?”

“Sorry,” Tristan says from where he’s curled on the floor with the blankets Alex found and tossed at him hours earlier. “I was wondering if you were awake.”

“Am and have been,” Alex says. “Can you sleep?”

“No.”

Alex stares at the ceiling, at the details made clear by the hours his eyes have had to adjust to the low lighting; then he gets an elbow under him to shove himself upright. “You should have said something sooner.”

“I was trying to relax,” Tristan says. He hasn’t moved, but his eyes are open, Alex can see when he looks over at him. They look darker in the dim lighting, like the irises are finding more color from the shadows of the room. “I didn’t want to wake you if you were asleep.”

“You were planning to just lie awake all night?” Alex asks as he kicks his blankets off and frees his feet. His body is protesting the movement, unhappy at this sudden commitment to consciousness even though the alternative has been unreachable all night, but Alex is feeling better in spite of the aches it’s producing along his spine and in his fingers. He likes taking action better than waiting for something anyway. “Is that how you deal with insomnia?”

“I don’t _have_ insomnia,” Tristan protests, and he finally sits up, shaking his head to work his hair free from the tangle it’s made around his shoulders. It looks better against the ordinary clothes Alex shoved at him before they made their futile attempt for sleep, the overlong shine of it more stylish and less a foolish affectation. “I usually just stay still until I fall asleep anyway.”

“Doesn’t work when you’re really having a hard time,” Alex says, leaning forward to reach for his boots. “You just need to embrace being awake. Really commit to it. It makes it easier.”

“Mm.” Tristan sounds skeptical, but he doesn’t offer further protest. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going out,” Alex says, tugging the straps of his boots over until they catch the attachments on the other side and lock in place. “I’m going to get a cup of tea.”

“What?” Tristan sounds perplexed. “It’s past one in the morning, nothing is going to be open.”

“Nothing _boring_ is going to be open,” Alex corrects as he latches his second boot on. “There’s always a couple all-night cafes that will keep serving caffeine to people like me. I might even be able to get something to eat, I’m starving.”

“We didn’t have anything for dinner,” Tristan agrees. “Should you really be having caffeine this late at night?”

“Don’t lecture me,” Alex says, getting to his feet and tugging the wrinkles from his shirt. “I told you, the only way to handle sleeplessness is to really commit to it.” He eyes Tristan, still sitting on the floor in a tangle of blankets and wearing Alex’s clothes. “Are you coming with me, or are you going to stay here and hope Morpheus takes pity on you?”

Tristan blinks. Alex turns away before he offers any kind of an answer; by the time the other is pulling his hair back into a ponytail, Alex is holding his boots out for him to take when he’s done.

The cafe is, in fact, still open, as it is always open. There are a few alcoholics in the corner, a little too loud and slurring over their orders when they try to speak into the automated receiver, but the rest of the seats are as empty as they always are at this hour, absent even the daytime weight of Officers scattered among the crowd, and the seat backs are high enough that when they have each claimed a side for themselves and sit down it’s easy to forget anyone else is in the place.

“Pot of Darjeeling,” Alex says as soon as he’s settled, speaking with the carefully slow pacing that works best with the finicky voice recognition of the cheap software. “And a BLT.” He draws back and gestures to Tristan, who is looking faintly panicked at the lack of a menu and the expectation for him to speak.

“Coffee?” he asks Alex instead, looking so anxious Alex doesn’t take the too-easy shot of teasing him.

“Espresso, too, if you want that.” He considers the tremor in Tristan’s fingers, the strain of hunger settling to a frown at the corners of his mouth. “What kind of sandwiches do you like?”

“Uh.” Tristan frowns deeper, touches a hand to his hair in a nervous attempt to smooth it over his head. “Tuna?”

“Good enough.” Alex pushes the button again, orders a “Tuna sandwich” and, after a moment of silent gesticulation in place of speech, “And a double espresso” even though he’s pretty sure Tristan only intended one. If it was an overstep it’s a minor one; Tristan doesn’t voice protest when Alex lets the button go, and when he falls back against the support of the bench it’s with relief writ clearly in the sag of his shoulders.

“Calm down,” Alex says as he leans back himself and kicks his feet as far out under the table as he can without running up against the space taken by Tristan’s own boots. “Everything will be better after some food and some tea.”

“Yeah,” Tristan agrees, sounding skeptical but not so much so that Alex wants to bother to argue with him. He’s looking down at the table, watching his fingers as he fits them together and slides them apart, and Alex takes advantage of the other’s distraction to stare at him for a moment. The warm lighting of the cafe is kind to the pale of Tristan’s hair, brings out streaks of gold in it as much as it highlights the odd translucence of his skin; Alex can see the pattern of blue veins under the skin at his wrists and along the backs of his hands, is sure he would be able to spot them against the thin skin over Tristan’s collarbones too if he weren’t hunched forward into shadow. The angle of his head is obscuring the detail of his features, but the set of his mouth is still clear to see, the tremble of repressed emotion at his lips obvious to see even if Alex weren’t looking for it.

“Talk to me,” Alex says on impulse, on the desire to stop the tremor of adrenaline shivering at Tristan’s lips before it breaks free into tears or full-blown hysteria, neither of which he has any inclination to deal with right now and both of which are likely to bring more attention than they want at present. Tristan looks up at being addressed, surprise overtaking the exhausted strain in his features, and Alex raises an expectant eyebrow as the whirr of the delivery droid indicates the arrival of their food.

“I have all these half-formed memories of yours in my head,” he says, looking away from Tristan’s stare so he can feed the droid the coins that will persuade it to give up its burden. He slides his sandwich over the table first; the tea is more complicated, the pot heavy and hot enough to require both hands. Alex is still maneuvering that onto the surface when Tristan takes a breath and reaches for his espresso. “I can remember a girl’s face but I don’t know her name. Lots of yellow hair, though. Sister?”

“Mm,” Tristan hums affirmative, nods as he sets his cup of coffee down on the table and reaches for his own food. His hands are a little steadier on the second motion. “Hailey. She’s my younger sister by four years.”

“So she’s, what, twelve?” Alex asks, dumping a spoonful of sugar into his cup in advance of the heat of the tea pouring over it.

“Fuck you,” Tristan says, sounding like he might be thinking about laughing. “She’s at university, she’s twenty.”

“You’re still a baby,” Alex informs him. The sugar is all but dissolved by the time he sets the pot down and moves to stir in whatever remains into the liquid. “Twenty-four’s barely old enough to be considered an adult, less so if you’re as woefully uneducated as you seem to be.”

“You’re not that much older,” Tristan says. He’s staring out past Alex’s head, squinting focus at something he’s recalling rather than seeing. “19 February 2178 makes you, what, twenty-seven?”

“I’ve been taking care of myself a lot longer than you have,” Alex says, rifling through unfamiliar memories of smiling parents, the affectionate teasing of an older brother, apartments clean and tidy and paid for with someone else’s money. “That gives me at least a decade’s worth of experience. Do you even support yourself?”

“I do,” Tristan says with all the defensiveness of someone for whom this has only very recently become true. “I was taking night classes along with my last job, it qualified me for the higher-range salary to pay for my apartment.”

“Yeah,” Alex says, blinking through exhausted evenings, words swimming on the page in front of him, practical tests at the Office that resulted in bruises and torn knuckles from reflexes made slow and heavy with exhaustion. “I’m seeing that.”

“You’re not the only one who lost valuable memories in this,” Tristan points out, and Alex can see that too as he skims at speed through knowledge that has never been his own because of past-tense payment Tristan made with sleepless nights and early-morning study sessions. “I want mine back too, you know.”

Alex blinks, lets the memories go to return to the present of an orange-lit cafe table and a cup of steaming tea. “Yeah,” he says, turning the handle of his cup around so he can fit his fingers into the loop and lift it to his mouth. “I just think mine are more necessary to my survival than yours are.”

Tristan frowns at him, his brows drawing together in irritation. “I don’t think you’re being fair.”

“I am,” Alex says as he takes a sip of the tea. It goes down hot, sweet just like he knows he likes it, but the flavor dissolves oddly on his tongue, the taste familiar but not right, somehow, missing some of the satisfaction that usually purrs down his spine with the taste. “You have all my programming languages, don’t you?” Tristan’s eyes glaze over, his attention sliding into the inside of his own thoughts at the prompt, and Alex keeps talking. “The data bypass codes, I think you probably have at least couple of those since I can’t remember anything when I try to think a problem through. My personal ID information. My birthday, which I admit isn’t critical to survival but is kind of a big deal, you jerk, who takes someone’s _birthday_?” He looks across the table, frowns at the cup of espresso on Tristan’s side. “Are you going to drink that?”

“What?” Tristan looks down at his cup. “Yes, of course.” He picks it up, lifts it to his lips; Alex can see the way he braces the cup against his mouth, can track the careful motions of someone accustomed to drinking blisteringly hot liquid with a care learned from too many burnt tongues. He only takes a sip, barely enough to wet his lips; then he makes a face and draws the cup back as he stares at it.

“That’s…” he shakes his head, frowns harder. “Something’s wrong.”

“Nope.” Alex sighs, edges his cup of tea across the table with some reluctance. “Try that.”

“I don’t like tea,” Tristan informs him with absolute certainty.

Alex raises an eyebrow. “I know,” he drawls. “But I do. Or I did. Try it.”

Tristan tries it. Alex can see the shock spread over his face to ease the skepticism from his forehead and the line of his mouth; Tristan’s eyes go wide, swallow the light until they look almost translucent, the grey lost to the glow of the illumination. “What--”

“Acquired tastes,” Alex says, reaching for Tristan’s espresso without waiting for permission. “You remember tea tasting good so it does.” He lifts the cup to his mouth, takes a sip. It’s bitter on his tongue, the taste so sharp it’s nearly sour, and he can feel the flare of satisfaction hit the back of his skull like he’s plugged himself into some kind of pleasure loop, all his synapses firing into the expectation of satisfaction even as his tongue protests the taste. “At least I got coffee in exchange. It would suck if you ended up with both of them.”

Tristan watches him take another sip with some pain in his eyes. “Are you saying coffee won’t taste good until I get my memories back from you?”

“Or until you learn to like it again.” Alex sets the cup down, watches Tristan’s eyes track it with the intensity of a caffeine addict; he’s waiting with a bright-white grin when the other looks back up. “Ready to have another go at blowing ourselves up?”

Tristan tightens his hold on his cup of tea. “Absolutely,” he says, and takes another swallow.

Alex starts laughing before he’s set the cup back down, and he doesn’t stop when Tristan starts to smile with him.


	8. Chapter 8

“What do you think happened?”

It’s a reasonable question. Last night it might have earned Tristan a demand to shut up and stay out of the way, but by the light of morning (or afternoon, more accurately; Alex didn’t want to set an alarm by the time they were finally drifting towards sleep) Alex’s patience is far lengthier than it was during the dark hours of the night. Besides, Tristan is calmer, now, less strained around the expectation of an imminent fight; it’s amazing how much him relaxing is doing for Alex’s tolerance of his presence.

“I’m trying to figure it out for sure,” Alex says, not looking up from the fuse he’s working free of the interface they blew out the day before. “I’m hoping it was just bad luck, a connection that slid loose when we started running current through it. That’s easy to replace and to fix myself.”

“Right,” Tristan agrees, for all the world like he understands what Alex is saying. There’s a pause, a second while Alex waits for the inevitable follow-up, and then: “What if it’s not the parts?”

“Then it’s the way I programmed the interface,” Alex says, “and we have a much bigger problem on our hands.” He tightens his grip on the fuse and twists hard to drag it free of its port. “The interface connects us to each other like we need, but it’s not intended to be used the way we’re using it.” Alex can feel himself frowning at this  consideration of what is the most likely possibility, after all. “ _None_ of this is supposed to be used for this purpose. I hate to say I agree with the Office on anything, but outlawing deliberate memory trading was a good idea.” When he reaches out for the new fuse Tristan offers it to him without speaking, and Alex takes it without commenting. “We’re trying to store at least some of our memory data on the interface itself, and it’s not intended to store anything. The Office requires barriers be put in place to prevent that, as if that would stop someone who’s really determined. We’ll overload the interface within a matter of seconds, and you have to have a very specific goal in mind to achieve anything within that time frame. The only people nowadays who really fuck around with mind-to-mind connections are the really crazy hackers.”

“Your friends?” Tristan asks hopefully while Alex grimaces at the fuse connection and tries to fit his fingers back past the tangle of wires to the interior of the interface.

“No way,” he declares. “My friends make illegal body mods and get at data we’re not supposed to see, yeah, but we don’t fuck around with the mind-meld stuff. We’re smart enough to stay away from that. You only get a couple runs at most before something goes wrong to kill you or turn you into a vegetable. That’s for the addicts, you know, the ones who try to plug into each other’s heads for the high of riding someone else’s thoughts.” Tristan reaches out to touch Alex’s wrist to get his attention; when he looks up Tristan holds his hand out in wordless invitation. Alex considers Tristan’s longer fingers, his narrower hands, and offers the fuse and the interface up for his attempt. “That’s just suicide roulette.”

“Isn’t that what you’re trying to do now?” Tristan asks as he draws the interface in towards him.

Alex leans against Tristan’s shoulder and reaches out to point out the fuse connection in the back of the nest of wires. “That’s what _we’re_ trying to do,” he says, drawing his hand back to give Tristan the space to work. He spares a glance up; Tristan is looking at the interface, his eyes focused and intent on the parts in front of him, his mouth relaxed on attention. He doesn’t look stressed at all; it’s as if his focus on the task at hand has pushed aside his survival instinct to the back of his head. Alex knows the way that feels and can respect the sight of it in someone else, even if he never expected to see it from this particular source.

“We don’t have a choice, if we’re going to straighten ourselves out.” Tristan braces the fuse against his fingertips, reaches out to thread it past the wires and into the slot on the interface. His fingers look delicate in the precision of the movement, though his borrowed knowledge can’t make up for Alex’s muscle memory. Alex lets him struggle through fitting the fuse past the gaps in the wires, doesn’t step in to snatch the task from him. “I really don’t want to spend the rest of my life with you trying to share out stolen memories between us.” Tristan catches traction on his movement, his forehead creasing with focus as the fuse slides into place. “I don’t _really_ want to spend any more time with you than I absolutely have to. And I want my own memories back from the inside of your head. I don’t know what you took but I’m damn sure it’s enough to be a liability to me if you just took off with them.”

“You never talk about _my_ memories,” Tristan points out as he draws his fingers back from the repaired interface and offers the weight of it back. “You have just as many of mine as I have of yours.”

“Yeah,” Alex says, adopting a tone of shock like he’s just remembered. “Wow, you’re right. How did I not notice...right, because they’re _boring_.” He takes the box back with one hand and reaches out with the other to flick Tristan’s forehead. “You need to live a little more, you know.”

Tristan exhales a tiny laugh, lets his hold on the piece go to rub at the impact Alex made with his forehead. “I don’t think I’m suited to life-and-death situations, honestly.”

“I don’t think you are either,” Alex agrees easily. He reaches for one of the two plugs into the board, pushes his hair back so he can slot it into the port behind his ear; there’s a hum against his teeth, a flicker in his vision, and then it’s settled, the weight of the wire tugging a familiar discomfort against his skull. “Just more proof you’re as boring as your memories.”

Tristan doesn’t rise to the insult. He’s watching Alex instead, staring at the plug for the repaired interface like it’s a poisonous spider or the deathtrap it very possibly might be. “I thought you said we weren’t trying again.”

“We’re not,” Alex agrees. Tristan is still staring at the unused second plug with an intensity that prickles discomfort down Alex’s spine; Alex reaches out to close his hand on it, to draw it across to his half of the desk just in case Tristan isn’t listening to him. “I’m going to get into the interface module and see if I can tell what the problem is.” He reaches for the power switch. “Just sit still and stay quiet, I’ll be back in a minute.”

Flicking the switch is the same jolt it always is, a rush of electricity that arches Alex’s back involuntarily and blows all the air out of his lungs in a sudden startled gasp. His vision hazes, clears, his attention refocusing on the text scrolling over his sight instead of on the headache-inducing blur the rest of the world has fallen into. It’s faster to coordinate with the interface like this, courtesy of one of his early body modifications, a square centimeter of metal laid behind his ear just above his main connection port; navigating through the interface’s data files is almost instantaneous, the action occurring as rapidly as Alex can form the shape of his goal in his head. The interface they’re trying to use is straightforward enough, a standard piece of proprietary machinery that caves almost instantly to the pressure Alex exerts on it at a few critical failure points. This, at least, he hasn’t forgotten how to do; the shape of the action in his head is more a memorized physical movement than a string of commands, the steps he takes as easy as opening his mouth for speech. The interface opens for him, letting him into the inner core of the file structure; on another day, another project, he would play with this more, would investigate the framework for the connection being made and streamline it to greater efficiency. But he doesn’t care about that right now -- the interface working is the most important thing -- and instead he pulls up the log files to skim for any error messages during their last attempt. He’s hoping for none, hoping that it will turn out against all odds to be a random failure of the electrical connections and not the interface, that they will be able to try again and have it work this time.

At least his hope dies quickly. He no sooner has the log data up than he sees the glaring warning message, in all caps like the interface’s silent scream was something he could hear during that first catastrophic attempt: DATA OVERLOAD. UNEXPECTED INPUT. SESSION WILL BE TERMINATED. It’s as he expected, no better than what he could reasonably have hoped for; the confirmation of his suspicions is only a thin comfort to him as he snaps himself out of the interface with more haste than care and reaches up to fumble the plug free, to growl “ _Fuck_ ” even before he’s powered down the board and cleared his vision of the electronic blur.

“What happened?” Tristan asks from the other corner of the desk, hesitant with the question like he’s afraid of drawing Alex’s wrath on himself or like he thinks it’s somehow his fault it didn’t work the first time.

“This isn’t going to work,” Alex declares without giving a more comprehensive answer. He shoves back from the desk, gets to his feet in a rush of irritated anger; he still double-checks that the interface is powered down before kicking the switch at the bottom of the desk to cut power to everything on it as he stomps towards the tiny dresser in the corner. “We’re going to need more help.”

“What?” Tristan gets to his feet slowly; by the time Alex has collected a handful of clothes and stuffed them into a bag, Tristan is barely standing, still hovering at the desk with a hand stretched out to rest his fingers against the surface like he’s afraid to let the contact go, as if he’s one of the machines gaining power from the now-dark surface of the desk. “Where are we going?”

“To get more help,” Alex informs him. He glances back, considers Tristan’s uniform folded in the corner, turns away from it; Tristan won’t need it while they’re gone, and if he doesn’t come back here afterwards it’s not like the uniform will be a major loss to him. “Come with me.”

Tristan does. There is something intoxicating to it, Alex thinks while his back is turned and he’s pulling on his shoes, something thrilling about being obeyed so completely by someone else. It’s not as if Tristan has much choice, he knows; it’s either this or commit them both to the untender mercies of the Security Office, and from the way Tristan’s expression went tense at Alex’s description of that possibility, he knows as well as Alex how poorly that would turn out for both of them. With a chunk of his memories missing he might not even be able to find his way back to his home, might not recognize the clean comfort of the apartment Alex can recall with perfect clarity himself. He can’t leave any more than Alex can afford to let him go.

Still, Alex admits to himself as he pushes the door open with Tristan trailing him like a shadow. It’s intoxicating.


	9. Chapter 9

Monica answers the door on the second knock.

Alex didn’t think to call ahead. It’s an oversight he realizes as he and Tristan climb the uncountable steps to the absolutely ordinary apartment Monica lives in; there’s nothing at all keeping Monica on-call for his purposes in the middle of the afternoon instead of out shopping or getting lunch or any number of the other things she does other than wait around for Alex to unexpectedly drop by. In the worst case scenario no one will be there at all; only slightly better would be her boyfriend answering the door instead of Monica, since that would leave Alex and Tristan to wait with him until the lady of the house returned. But it _is_ Monica who opens the door, and after only a minute of waiting, and without any of the irritation at being interrupted Alex was afraid of.

“Al,” she says, sounding a little surprised but mostly pleased, and that’s good too, it’ll be better to have her in a good mood for the favor Alex needs to beg of her. Then her gaze slides sideways, off Alex’s familiar features and to Tristan’s, and Alex can see her dark eyes go a little wider, her mouth go a little softer, and her eyebrows go all the way up to her hairline.

“Alright,” she says without looking back at Alex. “Come in.”

Alex stares at her at she steps to the side of the door, gesturing in clear welcome at the tidy space of her apartment. “What?” he blurts, knowing even as he speaks that he shouldn’t be questioning this stroke of good luck. “Don’t you want to know why we’re here?”

Monica shrugs, an upward cant of her shoulder that drags the corner of her mouth up with it. “If you show up with someone looking like _that_ \--” her tone and the tilt of her head combine to wholly encompass Tristan at Alex’s elbow, “I don’t even need an explanation.”

Alex can see Tristan flush in his periphery, can see crimson sweeping up to stain the line of his cheekbones as Alex’s jaw sets, his teeth bracing against themselves in a line of irritation he knows is wholly unjustified. He _knows_ how Tristan looks, obviously, can objectively appreciate the swath of gold hair down his back even if it’s somewhat tangled after the frantic events of the day before, has noticed the clear grey of the other’s eyes and can even admit that they are attractive, in a sort of clean-cut way that could be appreciated better by someone who liked blonds more, who _liked_ the clean-cut look, someone definitely and absolutely not Alex. He knows, too, that this is Monica’s preferred approach for personal interactions, that her appreciation is precisely as academic as his own, more observing the aesthetic appeal of a work of art than out of any immediate, personal desire.

Still. The color in Tristan’s cheeks grates irritation into Alex’s jaw.

“Is that all it takes?” he says by way of response, biting the words off into more harshness than he originally intended. He leads the way into the apartment, leaving Tristan to trail in his wake and shut the door behind them. “I could bring an Officer with me and you’d let him in if he was good-looking enough?”

Monica drops to sit in one of the armchairs across from the wide couch, the wealth of unnecessary furniture enough on its own to give the impression of money under the surface, to speak to a standard of living that only follows the guidelines the Office lays out in the thinnest sense. She crosses her legs, braces an arm over the edge of the chair; when she raises her eyebrow this time it’s aimed at Alex and weighted with skepticism he knows he deserves.

“You wouldn’t bring someone from Security here in the first place,” she observes, drawling the words slow like she’s making a point about being forced to spell out something perfectly obvious. “You’d rather die under interrogation than give up one of us, and if they had broken you to get the information you sure as hell wouldn’t be with them when they came.” Her gaze slides back to Tristan as he comes out of the entryway to hover awkwardly just inside the doorway to the living room. “He’s wearing your shirt.” A gesture of her hand waves the other in, indicates the empty couch with a flick of a wrist as good as an order, and Tristan obeys, crossing the room with a glance at Alex as he goes as if he’s asking permission. Alex meets his eyes for a moment, but he’s too distracted by whatever Monica is building up to to hold the contact as Tristan edges around the couch and carefully perches on the edge of a cushion.

“And exciting though it would be for you to show up on my doorstep to introduce your hot new boyfriend,” Monica says, unfolding her legs and leaning forward over her knees instead, “You both look like you haven’t slept in a day and a half, and not in the fun way. So there’s some kind of exciting story, which you should tell me now, or as soon as you sit down to stop hovering over me.”

“It’s not exciting,” Alex disagrees, more to be argumentative than because Monica is really wrong. “This idiot was working as a guard at the data bank I went to break into two days ago.”

Monica leans back in her chair. “The one with the data trail you were going to wipe?”

“Yeah.” Alex hesitates briefly over his options of seating; the couch makes the most sense, since he’s talking to Monica sitting across from it, but the biggest gap he’ll be able to get between himself and Tristan is one couch cushion, which seemed like plenty this morning and seems like nothing at all now, with Monica watching them. Sitting in the other chair seems forced, though, with vastly higher odds that Monica will comment on it, and he’s waited too long, if he pauses any longer she’ll say something anyway. He comes around the edge of the couch and drops next to Tristan while deliberately avoiding thinking about it. “And there was a guard.”

Monica glances at Tristan, understanding starting to form out of the open curiosity in her expression, but she doesn’t speak, and Alex keeps talking. “A guard with outdated equipment, to be precise.” He looks sideways, cuts a glare Tristan’s way; Tristan looks hurt, looks like he might be thinking about speaking, but Alex goes on fast, before he has time to frame some kind of a protest. “He tried to memory scan me.”

Monica’s mouth twitches. “What, without even buying you dinner first?”

Alex glares at her. “He used a _memory scanner_ ,” he repeats, louder and clearer to draw her attention back to the conversation at hand. “A _recalled_ one.”

He can see the exact moment the realization hits Monica’s thoughts. Her eyes go wide, the amusement vanishing as her mouth falls into slack horror; when she moves it’s with a jerk, her feet bracing wide on the floor as she leans in hard on her knees. “ _No_.”

Alex smiles, feels the bitter edge of it on his lips. “When I came to--”

“You _didn’t_.” Monica’s veered back to Tristan, all the appreciative interest in her face given over to appalled judgment. “Don’t you know about the failed tests the Office ran on those things?”

“I do _now_ ,” Tristan says in a tone halfway to bleak amusement and halfway to defensive.

“You didn’t,” Monica says again, reeling back to stare at them both together. “How are you still _alive_?”

“Luck, apparently.” Alex takes a breath, then lets it out, because if this was bad what is to come is worse. “But we swapped memories.”

There is a beat, a moment of complete silence. Monica stares at Alex, her expression blank, her eyes unreadable. Alex keeps talking. “Not all of them, but he’s got some of mine and I’ve got some of his. He knows how to program, technically, though he lacks any practical skill in it at all. And I can remember family walks on a beach and an apartment that is actually as boring as the Office tells you they’re supposed to be.” He leans back on the couch, recitation concluded and his momentary nerves forgotten. “And I don’t know how to get it undone.”

Monica keeps staring. A moment passes, a second, a minute. Tristan shifts discomfort on the other end of the couch, self-consciousness making itself known in the awkward movement of his body against the comfortable support. Alex keeps watching Monica throughout, meeting her gaze and barely blinking, not even moving to fiddle with his earrings as his nerves are urging him to do.

Finally she lets out a long, shocked breath. “You’re serious.” She looks to Tristan, back to Alex, encompasses them both in her reaction. “You actually jumbled your heads together and you want to _undo_ it?”

“Obviously we want to undo it,” Alex snaps. “I don’t want to be half _him_ for the rest of my life.”

“You’re lucky enough to have a life at all,” Monica fires back, surging to her feet to stare him down. “There’s no legal way to touch this, no documented protocol of any kind. Did you fuck with it on your own?”

Alex sets his jaw. “I tried reprogramming a two-way interface before we came here. It blew itself out.”

Monica’s hand cuts through the air like a knife, sweeps aside the possibility of this. “Of _course_ it blew itself out. This isn’t something you should be playing with, you should have come straight to me. How many days ago did this happen?”

“The memory scan was on Wednesday morning,” Tristan offer to that, speaking aloud for the first time since they came in. “We tried the interface yesterday evening.”

“At least it hasn’t been too long,” Monica allows, some of the tension bleeding out of her shoulders. “You know you’re going to lose the distinctions in those memories if you keep them too long?”

“Yeah,” Alex says, fast, before Tristan can speak up to ask for clarification. “I know.”

“Jesus,” Monica groans, pushing a hand through the weight of her hair; the movement eases as she goes, some of the shaky tension of the first revelation smoothing away as she takes a breath. “I can’t promise anything, you know.”

It’s as good as a declaration to help. Alex takes a breath and it’s Tristan who sighs relief, beating him to the reaction by a heartbeat. Monica shakes her head, rejection of something unstated inside her own thoughts, and crosses her arms, staring unseeing at the wall while her eyes go unfocused on whatever she’s thinking.

“Okay,” she says finally, enunciating the word into the clear certainty that always makes Alex feel like she knows what she’s doing even when he knows she doesn’t. “I’m going to call off sick from work for a few days. That’ll be the first thing. In the meantime you two should brace yourselves to give me as much help as you can. _You_.” She points at Tristan, her finger marking out a clear line in the air. “What’s your name?”

“Tristan,” Tristan says, sounding only a very little uncertain.

“Alright,” Monica says, and then, belatedly: “Monica,” offering a handshake exactly as businesslike as Alex could hope before gesturing down the hall, a wave of her hand encompassing the pair of shut doors leading to the bathroom and the bedroom respectively. “Poke through anything you want, take a shower, feed yourself, whatever. Be as nosy as you want, I don’t care, just don’t get offended at anything you find as a result.” She swings to Alex, her attention abandoning Tristan as easily as it landed on him. “You’re going to help me design the interface architecture.”

“From scratch?” Alex asks, pushing himself off the couch while Tristan hesitates to move.

“Gotta be,” Monica says, turning away as she reaches to press behind her ear and dial herself into a call to her official employment. “We’re taking on the impossible, right? Nowhere else to start but from the ground up.”

It shouldn’t be as reassuring as it is. It’s still a relief, and Alex doesn’t have to look at Tristan’s expression to know the painful gratitude in Alex’s chest is written clear to read in those telltale grey eyes.


	10. Chapter 10

“Jesus,” Monica groans after the first half-hour of stalled-out attempts to diagram the interface programming across her desktop. “You really _did_ lose a lot in this swap.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” Alex snaps, somewhat more aggressively than he intends. His patience is wearing thin, between Monica’s constant corrections to his vocabulary and her occasional comments to Tristan, who has taken her at her word and proceeded to wander around the entire apartment at irritatingly inconsistent intervals. “I don’t even know what’s missing, just that _something_ is. I _know_ I was better at this before than I am now.”

“For once that’s not narcissism talking,” Monica informs him. “You’re all but useless. If you tried to repurpose a basic interface with this level of work I’m surprised you didn’t burn out all your mods at once.”

“I didn’t know how bad of an idea it was,” Alex defends. “And pretty boy wasn’t volunteering any information on his end either.”

“That’s a pretty good idea, actually,” Monica says without looking up from the notes she’s leaning over. Her hair has been twisted up against the back of her neck to keep it out of the way; the lamp she has turned on the electric desk they’re both leaning over offers far better illumination than the one Alex has set up back in the familiarity of his own apartment.

“What?” Alex asks, frowning at the top of Monica’s head rather than trying to read the tiny pattern of her handwriting from upside-down. “I didn’t suggest anything.”

“You did,” Monica declares without looking up from the desk. “If you pick the brain of that pretty memory-holder you’ve got you two together might be half functional.”

“I’m perfectly functional on my own,” Alex protests, deliberately pushing aside the sound of Tristan’s voice dictating commands to him and the warmth of Tristan’s arm bumping at his elbow. “And he’s not _that_ pretty.”

Monica gives him an unimpressed look over the faint glow of the desk under them. “Don’t you think so?” she asks, then, looking up over Alex’s shoulder, “Come over here, not-pretty boy.”

“ _Hey_ ,” Alex snaps. “He’s not going to--” but Tristan is there, hovering right at his shoulder like he was just waiting to be called.

“Can I help?” he asks, sounding a little bit desperate and a lot hopeful. Alex shuts his mouth and fixes Monica with a glare over the distance of the tabletop that he hopes Tristan doesn’t see.

“Maybe,” Monica says, ignoring Alex’s glare and leaning back so she can gesture at the desk instead. “What do you make of this?”

There’s a pause, loaded with meaning in the lack of response Tristan gives. “I don’t understand it,” he says, finally, apology lacing his tone to softness. “I’m really not going to be any help in this, like Alexe--Alex said.”

Monica does _not_ look at Alex. She doesn’t look at him so hard she doesn’t even need to give a raised-eyebrow reaction at this almost-slip into his full name. Alex can feel his face going hot with completely unjustified embarrassment. “I don’t think Al is giving you enough credit,” she says evenly without a trace of emphasis on the nickname. “Do you know how to run a check for a user ID match out of a data set?”

“Set the user ID you’re searching against to variable IDcheck,” Tristan says instantly, an odd note in his voice like he’s reciting a poem memorized as a child. Alex can almost recognize the cadence of his own voice in the sentence, can almost catch the lilt of the almost-an-accent he used to have before he learned to flatten it out of identifiability and into something smooth and forgettable. “While the data set doesn’t return null, if IDcheck exists in field OfficeIdentification, store data to storage set.”

“You’re like a dictionary,” Monica says, approval strong under the words.

“ _I’m_ like a dictionary,” Alex says, knowing as he says it that he sounds petulant, that he sounds like the child he isn’t. “He’s just parroting back _my_ memories.”

“Which you don’t have access to right now,” Monica says. “And it’s making you half-competent at best and an active deterrent at worst. Don’t leave again,” she orders, lifting a hand to gesture over Alex’s shoulder at the still-hovering Tristan. “Get yourself a chair and sit down with us. I need you to fill in the pieces Al is missing.”

“I really don’t--”

“All you have to do is sit still and answer questions,” Monica says, talking over Tristan’s protests. “We won’t be any worse off with you than without you.”

“Okay,” Tristan says, and turns away to find the demanded chair.

Alex glares at Monica. “Stop dragging him into this,” he snaps in an undertone, not as careful as he ought to be to keep his voice below the level Tristan can hear. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“Neither do you, right now,” Monica points out. “He must have helped you with your first programming attempt, didn’t he?”

“That’s different,” Alex says, and Tristan is coming back but he’s still talking, he can’t swallow the words back in spite of the unintended audience he now has. “I didn’t have anyone else who could help.”

“So you just want to cut him loose as soon as you can?” Monica asks.

Tristan has hesitated over Alex’s shoulder. Alex can feel his tension, can feel the uncertainty coming off him in waves as his foot scuffs the floor in consideration of a retreat that would come too late to allow him to claim ignorance. Alex doesn’t look at him, doesn’t let himself think about the fact that Tristan can hear him at all. “ _Yes_ ,” he says, harsh with all the sincerity he can muster. “That’s the entire _point_ of this, to get rid of him before he knows too much himself and makes himself into a liability.”

“Alright,” Monica says, saving them all the awkwardness of a long enough silence to really consider Alex’s claim. “Then we need his help. It’ll be _faster_ with his help.” She looks up, gestures towards the chair Tristan is still hovering behind. “Sit down, not-pretty boy. We need your help to get this done quickly.”

Tristan sits. The chairs are too close, the desk too small; with him sharing the narrow space his elbow bumps Alex’s arm, his hair catches the edges of Alex’s periphery and draws his attention sideways. Alex doesn’t protest aloud, doesn’t even glance at the other; he just draws his attention in on the unreadable lines of text under Monica’s fingers and listens while she asks Tristan questions and gets reeled-off answers in return.

If he doesn’t talk, he doesn’t have to unclench the aching irritation from his jaw.


	11. Chapter 11

Tristan isn’t necessary for the entire process. Alex would prefer him to be absent, honestly, ideally asleep in the bedroom with the door shut so Alex can forget about him or basically silent if he must be in the room where they’re working. Anything is better than having him right by Alex’s shoulder, answering questions with Alex’s memories so it’s impossible to forget he’s there and impossible for Alex to focus on what he’s doing. It’s far better when the technical discussions are over, when Tristan can be sent off to amuse himself while Monica and Alex lean in over the desk to write out the lines of code Monica is producing from scratch.

“You can get some rest,” Monica offered when she sent Tristan away from the desk to clear more space for Alex to see what they’re doing. “You look like you’ve been awake for a week.” But “I’m fine,” Tristan had insisted, when Alex knows that to be a lie but not one that he cares enough to call him out on, and he’s lingered in the room with them after his initial perusal of the apartment, drifting from couch to chair to bookshelf like he’s being carried on some faint wind Alex doesn’t feel. Right now he’s at the window, working it open to let an actual breeze in; he’s directly behind Alex, which is the best place for him, Alex has decided, safely out of range of his vision where the peripheral awareness of Tristan moving won’t be a distraction to him.

“Check this,” Monica says, and Alex does, scanning over the block of code Monica’s drafted for any glaring inconsistencies. The commands are still strange, foreign in a way entirely at odds with his sense of self; he can feel his thoughts skidding when he can’t find understanding, as if the gap in his memories has left a hole of such precise size that he can almost gain understanding just from the lack. But he’s not checking the language; that’s Monica’s forte, her speed at picking up new code so remarkable she frequently leaves Alex uncertain whether she learned a new one the day or the year previous. It’s the syntax he’s scanning, the familiar shapes of brackets and logic loops falling into place in his head more as images than text, and for a moment he’s lost in the lines of pale text on the dark background, so involved in the hum of attention in his thoughts that he forgets about his surroundings entirely.

Then: “You can go out onto the roof if you want,” Monica says, her voice so level and steady with focus that it takes Alex a moment to realize she’s not talking to him. “It’s pretty flat for what of it there is.”

Alex looks over his shoulder. Tristan is standing in the window, looking back at the two of them; his eyes are wide, a little startled and a little guilty, as if he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t, and the window is open as wide as it will go and braced to let the chill of the wind tease the corners of the room. His hair is tied back, though Alex still has the other’s hairtie wound around his own; it must be one of Monica’s, Alex thinks, liberated from the bathroom by theft or offer, though he suspects the latter.

“Really?” Tristan looks back out the window, leaning forward so he can see the span of the roof beyond it. “Do you ever go out there?”  
“Sure,” Monica says, her voice still even. She’s still watching Tristan; so is Alex, the program forgotten for his focus on the clear gaze Tristan is turning on Monica. “Daniel and I drink out there in the spring, when it’s a little warmer than it is now. The view is fantastic day or night, depending on whether you’re looking up or down.”

“It sounds amazing,” Tristan says, and he’s looking at Monica, and he’s smiling, the expression brightening his entire face like the dull sunlight reflecting off the buildings outside is brighter and warmer than it actually is, like it’s enough to turn his hair to gold instead of white-yellow. Alex can feel a weight twisting in his chest, a pressure like an ache under his ribs and digging in against his breastbone.

“Sure,” he says, biting the word into rough edges on his tongue, and Tristan looks at him immediately, his attention swinging to Alex as if it’s his name in the other’s throat instead of aggression. His smile fades, his mouth relaxing into something softer, more open, more like a suggestion than a statement, and Alex looks away, cuts his gaze out the window and to what little of the surrounding buildings he can see. “As long as you don’t slip. It’s a long way to the nearest surface, unless you’re lucky enough to hit a stairwell or a balcony on the way down.” He glances back at Tristan, sees the flatline absence of a smile, the white of fear in his face as his gaze goes distant on the horror of his imagination. “Hope you have good balance.” He does -- Alex knows he does, can remember a childhood of scaling the outside railings of stairs and the occasional tree during family vacations out of the city -- but the way Tristan’s gaze veers out the window to consider the angle to the ground far below is enough to prove that he doesn’t know the same, or that he doesn’t trust his own reflexes as thoroughly as Alex trusts his.

“Good luck,” Alex says, and he looks away, back to the lines of clean code on the screen in front of him like they’ll offer comfort to the unpleasant ache lodged inside his chest. “This looks fine to me. What’s next?”

“Give me that,” Monica says, taking the keypad back from Alex’s hands, and then more clearly, projecting to Tristan still framed by open edge of the window: “It’s really not that dangerous. I’ll show you later when we take a break for dinner.”

“Okay,” Tristan agrees, sounding a little shaky but willing to go along with Monica’s suggestion. Alex keeps his eyes on the screen and doesn’t look up to see what expression Tristan is wearing. The focus doesn’t ease the pressure against his ribcage.


	12. Chapter 12

Monica doesn’t bring it up until much later, when Tristan is asleep in the bedroom and Alex is working his way through the third cup of coffee he can recognize as remarkably high quality in spite of it being the fifth he’s ever had in his life. It’s a strange experience that becomes less so with each passing hour, as his own awareness reworks itself to make space for Tristan’s memories; in another moment Alex would find this as worrying as he ought to, would see the adjustment as another symptom of the slide into a mental comfort that may make the undoing of this tangle impossible. But he’s tired, and he’s been worrying so much the last two days that he’s all out of energy for it, and right now he’s just glad to appreciate the caffeine of the drink in his hands even if it’s making him jittery all through his body.

“You’re enjoying that,” Monica observes as she comes in from the kitchen with a mug of her own to settle in the chair at the desk. She kicks back, away from the gentle glow of the computer monitor; when she looks out over the rest of the room it’s with a sigh of relief as the strain of hunched shoulders gives way to relaxation so strong it demands audible expression. “It’s a little weird to see you drinking coffee like a pro.”

“You’re telling me,” Alex says. “I’m the one who’s suddenly craving it.”

“I guess that would be odd,” Monica allows. There’s a beat of silence, a pause long enough that Alex knows what’s coming, is carefully looking down at his cup and not at Monica for the question that he knows is on the way.

“Do you resent him that much?” The question is even, clear of any judgment; Alex can hear curiosity under Monica’s voice, a little confusion, but none of the anger he is pretty sure he deserves for the rudeness he’s been displaying towards Tristan all day. “It sounds like he was an idiot, but it was an honest mistake. Is he really that intolerable to be around?”

“It’s not that,” Alex says, because he wants to be honest even though Monica is offering him an easy excuse, giving him an indulgence in irrationality that he knows she would allow him to claim and that Tristan would probably let slide too, given Alex’s interactions with him over the past day. “He _was_ an idiot, definitely.” He twists the cup in his hands, frowns into the dark surface of the liquid. “But it’s hard to stay mad at someone when you’ve got pieces of him in your head.”

“Why’d you try to scare him?” Monica asks, and this is a harder question, Alex can feel his chest knotting on the pressure of panic at the idea of answering. “You go out on the roof all the time, it might as well be flat for how likely it is he’d fall off. Did you suddenly get real protective of your memories or something?”

“It is a little bit dangerous,” Alex allows, twisting his cup harder and listening to his voice skid into defensiveness as he speaks. “He’s not used to it, he hasn’t done it before; he shouldn’t be playing around out there while we’re both distracted.”

“He’s not a kid.”

“I _know_ ,” Alex snaps, too-fast and too-loud, and that was a giveaway, he can feel his skin going hot with self-consciousness as Monica falls silent. His chest still hurts; the pressure isn’t easing at all. “I know he’s not. I’ll take him out there later, if he wants to go so bad.”

At least Monica doesn’t leave him in suspense. She clears her throat, reaches out for her mug of coffee as she speaks. “So have you always had a thing for blonds, or is this a new--”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Alex spits, hard and fast and before Monica is able to finish her sentence. “Shut _up_.”

Monica does not shut up. Alex didn’t really think she would. “That bad?” There’s the sound of her taking a sip from the edge of her mug, a click as she sets it back down on the table. “Jesus, Al, he’s so squeaky-clean I bet he’s never even jaywalked without special dispensation from the Office. What the hell are you going to do with that?”

“Nothing,” Alex says, and takes a hasty swallow of coffee. It’s too hot, it burns a line of aching heat down his esophagus as he swallows. “I’m not going to do _anything_. It’s not him, it’s nothing about him, it’s _nothing_.”

“Yeah,” Monica agrees with so much deadpan Alex can taste the sarcasm in the air. “I can really see how calm you are about this.”

“Fuck,” Alex says again, a little more softly, and braces his elbow on the table so he can press a hand to his forehead. “Look, it’s not him, okay?” He’s talking fast, rushing over the words even though he’s not sure what the conclusion will be, and Monica lets him talk without trying to interrupt him. “It’s me, it’s that he’s got my memories in his head. Sometimes he turns a certain way or says something and it’s like looking in a mirror, or hearing a recording of myself. It’s _weird_ and it’s _interesting_ and that’s _it_ , okay? It’s just the parts of him that feel familiar. It’s why I want them _back_ , because they’re not even him, it’s just me in his head.”

“Damn,” Monica says from the other side of the desk. “I knew you had issues but I never figured you for such a narcissist.”

Alex looks up. Monica’s grinning, the dark of her eyes sparkling amusement as she watches him, her lips tugged up into a smirk like the two of them are sharing a secret. It makes Alex laugh in a bright spill of sound that feels like a weight is lifting off his shoulders, and when he moves it’s to slump back in his chair instead of tensing in over his cup of Monica’s coffee.

“I’ve got way more problems than that,” he allows. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

“I bet,” Monica says. She takes another swallow of coffee, looks up at Alex over the lip of the mug. “Do you know if he even likes guys?”

“No,” Alex says, even as the question prompts an answer from his memories: the recollection of the friction of unfamiliar lips on not-his own, the stutter of not-his heartbeat at the smile of a boy from across a coffeeshop, the images of favorite fantasies in the darkened interior of an apartment while not-himself--

“ _No_ ,” he says, harsher and harder than he expected, knowing even as he says it that his tone makes him a liar. “No, I didn’t ask. Because it doesn’t matter.”

“Okay,” Monica says, audibly skeptical but feeling kind, apparently, and she looks away to her coffee, lets Alex take a breath and cool his blood and his cheeks at the same time.

When they speak again, it’s about the program, rehashing details they’ve already gone over four times and discussing possible reworkings of the data filter they finalized hours ago. It’s an obvious change of subject; in other circumstances Alex would be irritated by it, would feel the effort Monica is obviously applying too strongly to allow him any relief in the avoidance of the topic at hand. Right now, with the knot in his chest present but still eased, he’s all gratitude.


	13. Chapter 13

Monica finally caves to exhaustion in the early hours of the morning, when Tristan emerges from the bedroom bleary-eyed and trying to disentangle the knots from his hair with his fingers alone. It’s been over an hour since even Monica’s focus became too unsteady to keep working; at that point she and Alex stopped and gave themselves over to the easy, pointless small talk of long-time friends as comfortable with each other as they are alone. Alex barely noticed the increasing rate of his yawns, forgot to pay attention to the painful weight against his chest; it’s not until Monica looks up and offers “Morning” in the direction of the shadowed hallway that Alex remembers why the apartment is so quiet and feels the pressure return like it never left.

“Good morning,” Tristan says politely. His hair is a mess even when he works the tie free; Alex watches him sideways, too sleepy to even sustain the effort of pretending to not be watching the other push the weight of it back from his features. He looks better than he did, if not yet wholly awake; when he pulls the locks back up into a loop at the back of his neck he looks even better, almost functional in spite of the pre-dawn hour of the day.

“You look better.” It’s Monica who says it, framing words like she’s pulled them straight from Alex’s stuttering mind and silent lips. “That’s good, I didn’t want to take the couch when I have my own bed right down the hall.” She pushes to her feet, stretches in a long curve of motion; Alex can hear the joints of her shoulders crack at the tug, can see Tristan flinch at the sound in his periphery. “I’ll be back when I feel like a human being again. You can sleep on the couch if you need it, Al.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Tristan asks in a rush, spilling the words like he’s racing with Monica’s movement down the hall towards her bedroom.

Monica pauses and looks back at him with consideration in her eyes. “Not with the program,” she says at last, but the words are slow enough that Alex can hear the second half of the sentence before she gets to it. “We’ll need the interface itself, though. You’d save me the time of shopping if you went out to get it while I’m sleeping.”

“Okay,” Tristan says, his agreement coming so fast Alex looks to him in surprise. There’s no indication of the insecure uncertainty he showed during his first shopping run with Alex; even the self-consciousness from their interactions the day before is lessened, as if his confidence has increased proportionally with his sleep. “I can take care of it.”

“Awesome.” Monica jerks her chin towards the stack of notes at the corner of the desk, aligned with far more organization than Alex’s own working sketches ever are. “There’s a list of specs there for what we’ll need; it’s a fairly basic piece but it needs to be exact. Al can show you where the money is, take a handful of it with you.”

“Thanks,” Tristan says, but Monica is waving him off before he’s done speaking, moving away down the hall and shutting the door to the bedroom with a decisive _click_ before Tristan has found the list on the desk. Alex looks away from the hallway and back at Tristan; he’s leaning over the desk, studiously looking through the stack of paper and very deliberately not so much as glancing in Alex’s direction.

Alex clears his throat. It’s a little harsher than he intended, and Tristan startles more than he expected, but it gets him the other’s attention like it was supposed to and he can’t really complain about that. “I can come with you,” he suggests, before he has a chance to think the better of this attempt at not-quite apology for his prickliness the day before. “It’ll probably be easier with the two of us.”

Tristan’s gaze skims Alex’s face, reading details from the lines of exhaustion that Alex doesn’t intend to offer and isn’t sure he wants to have read. His forehead creases, his mouth draws into a frown. “You don’t have to,” he says, looking back down at the paper he’s located from the desk. “I really think I can handle it on my own. You don’t need to lose sleep on my account.”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t handle it,” Alex says, trying to level off the rasp of exhaustion from his voice to achieve something closer to the neutral calm he’d like to display. “I just thought you might want the company.”

Tristan looks back up. Their eyes catch, hold for a moment; this time Alex is the one to look away, to duck his head and bring a hand up to push through his hair. “Besides,” he says to the table, reaching and finding an approximation of teasing from his drained reserves of energy. “On your own you might go on a spending spree and buy way more than the one thing we need. It’s not _my_ money, but.”

“You are Monica’s friend,” Tristan says, easing Alex towards this escape route like he’s able to see what the other is attempting. “It’d be the nice thing to do.”

“That’s right,” Alex says. He curls his fingers into the tie holding his hair back, tugs the elastic free so he can wind it around his fingers instead and let his hair fall around his face. “Don’t want to leave you to spend all her money while she rests.”

“Right,” Tristan says, and clears his throat gently enough that it sounds nearly casual. “You’re coming with me, then?”

“Yeah,” Alex says, more decisively this time, and pushes to his feet. He can feel how tired he is once he’s upright -- the strain in his shoulders from his hunched position is an ache when he moves, lack of sleep has turned into stiffness along his legs -- but he doesn’t flinch, just tips his head back to shake his hair out of his face. “Let’s go.”

They’re quiet during the descent to the street. It takes several minutes to get down the stairs that lead up the several floors to Monica’s apartment -- the elevator is perpetually out-of-service thanks to the enthusiasm of the students who live on the lower floors -- and Alex’s exhaustion makes the steps somewhat more challenging to navigate than they would be otherwise. Tristan keeps pace; there’s a possibility, a strong one, that he’s slowing his steps to match Alex’s, but Alex doesn’t think about that any more than he thinks about the way Tristan keeps looking back at him like he’s going to say something before he doesn’t, before the quiet falls over them again like a physical weight. By the time they make it to the street Alex is regretting his decision to go with Tristan; the adrenaline of their understanding in Monica’s apartment has faded to the breathlessness of exercise on a severe lack of sleep, and the cut of the breeze on the main street is enough to make him wish he had stolen one of Monica’s coats on the way out the door.

“You couldn’t have brought a couple jackets when we left?” Tristan mumbles beside him, low enough Alex almost doesn’t hear him. When he looks over Tristan isn’t meeting his gaze, is staring off down the street with the focused attention of a man ready to see through some unpleasant task, but his arms are crossed hard over his chest, his hands gripping tight at forearms left bare by the short sleeves of the t-shirt borrowed from Alex’s dresser.

“I was trying to be efficient,” Alex says, fixing Tristan with a mock glare that he holds even when the other looks at him with what looks like an edge of guilt in his expression, like he’s not decided yet if he wanted Alex to hear him or not. “Besides, I _like_ all my jackets. I don’t want any of them contaminated with your Office-abiding ways.”

Tristan’s mouth quirks on a smile, his eyes going brighter than the dim haze of pre-dawn sunlight can account for. “Is that how lawfulness works?”

“Absolutely,” Alex says. He unfolds his arms from their instinctive angle over his chest, deliberately straightening into the wind. “It’s great, mundane things like the cold stop bothering you when you can be constantly wondering about the sum total of trouble you’ve caused to the Security Office.”

Tristan snorts a laugh. “Your lips are turning blue.”

“So are yours,” Alex informs him, although it’s not true; in actual fact Tristan looks flushed with the chill instead of pale from its effect, like the warmth of his body has risen to the surface of his skin to streak color across the high line of his cheekbones and hot at his mouth. The smile isn’t helping either; even with the visible shivering that is running through Tristan’s shoulders and the set of his jaw, his smile looks so relieved as to make up for any strain the cold might induce. Alex looks away down the street; there’s a spill of light from one of the storefronts, the deliberate flicker of neon to call in potential shoppers from the cold of outside. “Let’s try that one first.”

“Do you know this shop?” Tristan asks as Alex takes the lead on legs stiff now from cold as much as exhaustion and tugs the door open.

“No,” Alex admits immediately, caught into relief by the wave of warm air that spills from the interior. “But it’s _warm_.”

It’s not all that warm, really. Once the door shuts behind them and Alex can stop himself from shivering he can recognize that the air is still cool, heated to the point of reason and no farther in the way of perpetually-struggling commercial retailers. But it feels like heat against the chill of his skin, even if he has to wait a few minutes for his shivers to subside, and the lack of customers at this early hour is perfect to allow them the time to browse through the offerings.

“Morning,” Alex calls, lifting a hand to the teenager behind the front desk to offset the possibility of unneeded hovering attention. It gets him a bored wave in return before the boy looks back to the screen he was hunched over when they came in, and then they’re free to browse as much as they want without the chipper “Can I help you?” Alex has learned to hate.

“What does she need?” he asks, turning back to Tristan and reaching for Monica’s list. Tristan produces the paper from his pocket; it’s not until Alex has unfolded it and is reading over the items that he realizes any attempt at recognizing the details by name is going to be useless on his own. Some of them he barely knows, has relearned during his work with Monica like they’re a foreign language instead of his native tongue, but most are unintelligible, the recollection of their meaning swept out of his head and into Tristan’s in that crackle of electricity from days before.

“Shit,” he says, offering the paper back to Tristan with a sigh. “That’s all yours, I can’t understand any of it.”

Tristan takes the list back without comment and falls into step at Alex’s heels as he makes for the shelves of person-to-person interfaces at the back line of the store. He’s reading the list as they walk, following Alex without any visible effort; when Alex glances sideways at him Tristan’s not looking at him, and his expression has gone soft with inattention as he absorbs information from the page. Alex can see the feathery length of his eyelashes in the shadow, their pale color granted weight by the lack of the direct illumination that washes them to platinum. He blinks once, his eyes skimming over the page, and then lifts his head, scanning rapidly over the cases before reaching out to gesture towards a row. “Those.”

Alex looks. He recognizes the shape of the ports shown in the picture, if not the text on the side of the box; it’s a relief, to have familiarity still at his mental fingertips even if his point of reference is broken. “Oh,” he says, adopting a haughty tone. “ _Those_. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“My mistake,” Tristan apologizes, trailing in Alex’s wake to investigate the boxes arranged on the display racks. “I should have been more considerate.”

“No kidding.” Alex picks up one of the boxes more for the purpose of having something to turn over in his hands than because he’s really looking at it. Tristan takes a half-step in, closer than Alex expected him to come; the edge of his shirt ruffles against Alex’s sleeve, his hair catches at Alex’s shoulder before Tristan tucks the lock behind his ear. “You can’t expect an ordinary person to know your crazy elitist jargon.”

“Of course,” Tristan agrees. There’s a pause while Alex twists the box idly in his hands, while Tristan keeps watching him in silence. Then: “Not that one,” decisive and so clear that it startles Alex’s attention up from what he’s doing to look at Tristan’s face.

“What?” he says, his thoughts working slow on the chill still clinging to his skin and his attention still too scattered to come together quickly.

“That’s not the one we want,” Tristan says, reaching to tug the container out of Alex’s hands and set it back on the rack. “That brand runs more expensive than the quality deserves. It’s the brand the Office uses, but it’s not any better than the cheaper options available.” He points to the price tag pasted onto the corner. “And it’s been marked up even more than it was originally.”

Alex stares at Tristan for a moment. The other is looking at the boxes arrayed on the shelf, his eyes focused and mouth relaxed on the attention he’s bringing to the problem at hand; Alex can see when he finds the brand he wants just from the way his mouth curves and his eyes go brighter. He absolutely lacks a poker face -- his satisfaction at the result of his search is clear in every line of his expression -- but it’s not like it matters right now, and Alex catches himself smiling too even before he’s turned to see the interface Tristan has just pulled from the rack.

“You have a knack for this,” he says, taking the weight of the box into his hands himself. The picture looks better, the parts more familiar in a way that pings recognition in the back of Alex’s head, that suggests a long-lost memory of working with this same interface before, of reprogramming screens of code with nothing but the dull hum of the sleeping city around him. “You could become a rebel like us, with that kind of knowledge.”

“Yeah?” Tristan asks. Alex can hear his smile and doesn’t look up to see it directly. “I kind of am already. At least part of my memories are, and that’s most of it, isn’t it?”

“Hm.” Alex makes a show of frowning at the box, turning it over once more even though it’s completely needless before he hands it off to Tristan’s waiting hands. “I guess you can be an honorary member.” He does look up, then, catching Tristan’s attention with his own before he deliberately lets his smile go lopsided and teasing and leans in like he’s sharing a secret. Tristan tilts in immediately, ducking to match Alex’s angle; Alex’s hair catches at Tristan’s forehead, the heat of Tristan’s exhales gusts warm against Alex’s face.

“I like you better when you’re part me,” Alex confesses, grinning wider to make it a taunt instead of an insult.

Tristan coughs a laugh, looks away and down while Alex leans back, satisfied at his hit. “Is that so?” he asks, glancing up at an angle that is very nearly coy. “Little bit narcissistic of you, isn’t it?”

“That’s what Monica said,” Alex says. “You didn’t jumble yourself up with her too while I was out of the room, did you?”

“Maybe it’s just true,” Tristan suggests, and he’s really smiling now, amusement eclipsing the strain that has been laid into his forehead and the set of his jaw since the accident. His eyes are much softer when they’re relaxed; it’s more distracting than it should be. “And she and I are both smart enough to see it.”

“If you are it’s my memories making you that way,” Alex tells him, and is rewarded immediately by another huffed laugh. He looks away while Tristan is still smiling, clearing his throat and reaching for another box. “You sure that one’s better than this?”

It takes them longer than it should to make a decision. Luckily, with Monica asleep there’s no one to complain about the time they waste on the shopping process, and by the time they’re walking back to the apartment, the wind has eased itself out of the bite it held on the way out.

Alex is still tired as they start the climb to Monica’s apartment, but he find it bothers him less than it did during the descent.


	14. Chapter 14

Alex sleeps longer than he intends. He’s dizzy with exhaustion by the time Monica comes out of the bedroom still yawning sleep out of her voice; he barely offers a greeting at all before retreating down the hallway to take her place in the bed that is rapidly becoming coveted property for three people at once. He doesn’t take his jeans off, doesn’t even manage to get under the blankets at first; he just passes out over the top of the comforter, sleeps soundly for a few hours, and even then only surfaces to find his way under the weight of the blanket and fall back asleep. By the time he wakes he has lost all sense of time; his clothes have left imprints on his skin, his hair has gone greasy enough that he can feel it, and he takes the first ten minutes of consciousness to take advantage of Monica’s shower and Monica’s shampoo to get himself back to some level of cleanliness. There’s a few extra shirts in the bag he packed before he and Tristan left; he trades out his rumpled one for another, dark green with a logo for a brand he doesn’t recognize printed across the back. With his hair pulled back with Tristan’s hairtie he looks more himself, the shadows under his eyes faded to a reasonable level instead of the growing bruises they were, and by the time he emerges to the living room he’s ready to offer a smile to both of the other two.

Neither of them look up when he comes in. Monica is leaning over the computer monitor again, one hand pointing to the screen and the other spread wide over the buttons on the touchpad; she’s looking at the monitor in front of her, where Alex can see the lines of codes winding across the screen even at a distance, but she’s smiling in spite of what she’s doing, saying something so low Alex can’t hear it. Tristan huffs a laugh at the unheard words, lifts a hand to gesture at something on the screen Alex can’t read; it looks like a dance, like something practiced for weeks instead of for a few hours, and Alex can feel the pressure in his chest again, can feel his ribcage crushing in on itself until it’s suddenly hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to keep looking at the dark of Monica’s hair so close to the pale of Tristan’s.

He doesn’t speak. Neither of them looked up at his entrance; it seems reasonable that they haven’t seen him at all, that they maybe think he’s still asleep in the other room, and they’re apparently too distracted by their murmured conversation to notice when he shuffles across the floor to the window left open again by Tristan or Monica, he doesn’t know which. It’s an easy thing to catch the edge under his palms and hoist himself up over the ledge; his feet leave the ground, he swings a knee up over the lip, and then he’s on the rooftop itself, sliding forward to rest his weight on the sleek metal of the surface instead of holding himself up by the support of his forearms. The wind is cold, cutting more directly to Alex’s skin here than it did on the street far below where the buildings are enough to cut the chill, but the sleep has helped, or maybe it’s just that his blood is too hot and too near the surface of his skin to let him feel the discomfort. He doesn’t go back inside, doesn’t retreat to obtain a jacket to block the wind; he just slides sideways by a foot, spreads his legs out over the roof, and stares out unseeing into the blinding reflection off the building on the opposite side of the street.

“Alexei?”

The sound is startling. Alex wasn’t expecting anyone to come after him, and it’s Monica he was anticipating if he was to be interrupte. He tenses, his shoulders hunching in over himself even as his mouth works on autopilot to say “Don’t call me that” with a rough edge he doesn’t have to try for. There’s a pause, a breath of silence as Alex’s heartbeat pounds into a frantic rush in his pulse; then, before he looks sideways, before he can think better of it: “She has a boyfriend” in one defensive rush, sharp with broken-glass hurt that Alex can’t figure out how to dull.

There’s a beat of silence. Alex wants to look at Tristan; after a moment of steeling himself he does, turning his head sideways to see the way the wind is catching at a long lock of pale hair. Tristan is staring at him, his eyes wide and wholly absent any machinations; it’s more frustrating than the alternative would be, to have him look so lost at the raw edge under Alex’s voice.

“Did,” he starts, stops himself, and Alex thinks he’s going to look away but he doesn’t, he just keeps staring as his cheeks start to go pink from cold or embarrassment or both. “Did it seem like we were flirting?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Alex says, and he wants to look away, wants to cut his gaze sideways and back to the safety of the blinding reflection, but he doesn’t. “I’m just letting you know.”

Tristan’s mouth twitches. It’s a tiny motion, too fast for Alex to justify as a laugh or even a smile; it might just be a cringe, from the wind or from the edge still in Alex’s voice, it’s impossible to say.

“Okay,” he says, slow, like he’s easing Alex back from some invisible ledge. “Thanks.”

“His name is Daniel,” Alex says, and he knows he’s struggling for delayed-reaction rationality now but he can’t stop talking, not with the way Tristan is staring at him and the way he can’t look away. “He’s a nice guy, they’re good for each other.” He runs out of air, takes another lungful. “She flirts with a lot of people, it doesn’t mean she’s actually interested in them.”

“Okay,” Tristan repeats again, and then, all at once: “It doesn’t matter, you know.” His eyes are clear, his gaze is steady, but his mouth is trembling, his lips tense on some kind of emotion Alex can’t quite identify and doesn’t let himself look at very long.

“Right,” Alex says, the knot in his chest easing, his breath coming deeper, easier, filling his lungs with chill air and converting it into heat. Tristan’s still not moving away, not retreating back into the warmth inside the apartment, and Alex can feel the moment between them stretching well past the point of comfort and over into strained awareness, their held stare gaining intensity with each passing second. It’s too much to diffuse, too heavy in his head for him to possibly get away with feigning ignorance, but he tries anyway, falling back on the reflex of teasing to snap the strain forming itself in the distance between them. “Should have known you wouldn’t let something like a boyfriend stop you. You’re a lot more of a player than you look, you know.”

Tristan smiles at that, but it’s brief, just a flicker of motion that doesn’t quite make it all the way to his eyes. “You would know,” he says, and Alex feels the weight of the words like electricity, a shock that sends him tumbling back into the space of borrowed memories, into piecemeal details of a very few relationships slow to form and quick to fade, into memories of kisses and hands dragging across skin that he can remember from the wrong way round, from the opposite side of the interaction than the one he would like to have.

Alex is the one to look away. He can feel the action like a spoken surrender, or maybe the first suggestion of an apology; the tension between them cracks, evaporates, and then he’s looking back out across the street to the opposite building, feeling his skin prickle with self-consciousness and his throat strain on tension while his memories are still reeling through the friction of lips on skin, the pressure of hands on hips, the drag of bare skin warm on itself.

“I would,” he agrees without looking back to meet Tristan’s gaze.

Alex doesn’t know how long Tristan lingers in the window. He doesn’t look over again, doesn’t turn his head to see if Tristan is smiling, or frowning, or flushing with embarrassment or anger either one. He just waits for one minute, two, five, until by the time he finally glances sideways again Tristan is nowhere to be seen.


	15. Chapter 15

Alex is back on the roof by sundown.

He spends the better part of the day inside, after Tristan retreats to the bedroom and Monica summons Alex in to take his place. She refrains from commenting on the brief exchange of the afternoon, to Alex’s immense relief, instead limiting their conversation and their focus to the project at hand. The project is coming together, the various separate pieces of the program for it all but in place; Monica gives the interface deconstruction over to Alex, lets him work open the case for the off-the-shelf part as she starts work on the last step of the program, the portion that will takes the filtered memories and deposit them back in the heads of their original owners. Alex is startled when Tristan emerges from the bedroom some time after he vanished down the hallway; it feels like it’s only been a couple of hours, but when he looks up the sun is sinking into the orange of the city haze and threatening to begin its descent behind the visible buildings.

“Enough,” Monica says, taking the half-assembled interface out of Alex’s hands and setting it aside with a set to her mouth that brooks no argument. “You’ll make mistakes if you don’t take a break.”

So he’s taking a break. The air is sun-warmed, the rooftop still holding to the heat of the day as the wind dips back towards the same early-morning chill that accompanied he and Tristan’s shopping trip earlier. The radiance under him does half the job towards keeping him comfortable; the other half is achieved by the bottle in his hand, the open lid occasionally offering the scent of hops and lemon to his nose as the wind gusts the aroma towards his face. It only took half the oversized bottle to warm all Alex’s skin to the flush of mild intoxication, and with the escape of the apartment window a few feet away he doesn’t have to worry about freezing as a result. Besides, it’s pleasant to have the haze of alcohol settling over his thoughts, blurring a little of the stress he’s carried for the last few days into something bearable, pushing it off to be resumed in the morning, after sleeping, anytime that’s not this exact moment.

Right now, that reprieve feels like enough.

“I think that’s mine.”

Alex glances sideways. It’s Tristan, of course, leaning out of the window and eying the bottle in Alex’s hand instead of Alex himself. It’s the first thing he’s said directly to the other since his retreat to sleep earlier in the day; Alex is grateful for the mundanity of it.

Alex looks down at the bottle, make some show of considering the label. “Yeah, no,” he says, and brings it to his lips to swallow another mouthful. “Pretty sure this is Monica’s, actually.”

“I mean it’s my memories,” Tristan clarifies. “Unless you happen to have a real taste for exactly the kind of beer I usually drink.”

“He doesn’t,” Monica calls from inside the apartment. After a moment she comes into sight, urging Tristan to the edge of the window by the expedience of leaning in and taking up half the space in the opening. Tristan glances at her, then looks back at Alex as she keeps talking. “Al can’t stand beer. I thought that’d be safe at least.”

“Whatever,” Alex says, looking out towards the city beneath him as the sun sinks towards darkness and the electronic lights below emerge into clarity. “It’s mine now, in both respects. You’ll both just have to deal with it.”

“You’re drunk,” Monica informs him, as if he needed to be told.

“Probably,” Alex admits. “That was kind of the point.”

“Can I have some?” Tristan asks. “It sounds like it would taste great.”

“Sure,” Alex says without offering the bottle. “Come and get it.”

He’s not really expecting Tristan to take him up on the taunting suggestion. The fading light is leaving everything in the low-visibility haze of twilight and Alex hasn’t forgotten his own deliberate attempts to frighten Tristan out of precisely this idea. But Tristan has forgotten, or maybe the teasing wasn’t as effective as Alex thought, because what he does is set his mouth and reach out to brace an arm against the edge of the sill with a force that speaks to his absolute determination.

“Shit,” Alex says, and reaches out without thinking to grab at Tristan’s shoulder and steady him as he swings himself up and onto the roof with far less grace than Alex’s experience grants him. “You’re gonna fall before you even get any booze in you.”

“I’m fine,” Tristan insists, sounding only a very little bit shaky as he gets his weight over the rooftop and off the more precarious balance of his knees. “It’s not that steep anyway.”

“I told you,” Monica says from the window. “Al just feels the need to be a dick sometimes.”

“Shut up,” Alex tells her without looking away from Tristan or easing his grip on the other’s shoulder. “You alright?”

Tristan glances at him. His eyes are bright, his mouth soft in the moment before he looks away to smile over the city. “Yeah.” He reaches out and closes his hand on the neck of the bottle just under Alex’s; Alex lets the bottle and his hold on Tristan’s shoulder go at once, pulling his hands back to the safest distance he can manage. It proves to not be that far at all; the roof is wide enough for four or five people, if they’re very close friends, but Alex is on the narrow side from the window, and his hold on Tristan’s shoulder pulled the other in close against him when he settled himself. There’s another few inches to his left, enough to give himself a gap between his hip and the heat of Tristan’s, but he can’t get any real distance, and moving away would look like far more of a rejection than what Alex is willing to give.

Monica clears her throat from the window. “Well,” she says, only drawling the word a very little bit. “I’m going to get some rest, I think.” She leans back in, out of the framing the windowsill provides; Alex glances at her, attempts a glare to stop her movement, but she’s not looking at him and her retreat is already completed. “I’ll let you two know when the bedroom’s free for one of you. Don’t freeze while you’re out there.”

“Thanks, mom,” Alex snaps, but Monica is gone already, vanished back into the shadows inside without even  waiting for his response, and then it’s just him and Tristan already lifting the bottle to his lips. There’s a spill of motion from the inside, a wave of liquid rushing to Tristan’s mouth; Alex can see him start to swallow, can see the motion stick and abort before he swings back forward with the wet cough of someone startled by the bitter of alcohol.

“Take it easy,” Alex grins, reaching out to take the bottle back before Tristan drops it over the roof. “You’ll choke yourself trying to drink like that. Don’t you remember how booze works?”

“Shut up,” Tristan coughs, rocking an elbow out to press against Alex’s ribs. “Has beer always been so bitter?”

Alex doesn’t pull away. He lets the contact linger, lifts the bottle to his mouth instead to demonstrate a far smoother swallow than the one Tristan took. His head is fuzzy, his vision spinning the city lights into a dizzy haze; when he swallows the flavor burns his tongue, bites at the back of his throat until he exhales hard into the air.

“You make it look delicious,” Tristan observes. When Alex looks at him Tristan’s eyes have caught the ambient light of the city below, have turned clear and bright in the illumination. His hair is tugged back into a smooth line, the yellow of the strands washed into silver by the dim light. “Did I really like the way that tastes?”

“Apparently,” Alex says. He holds the bottle out sideways without asking if Tristan wants it again. Tristan’s fingers are warm against his knuckles when he takes the weight. “It tastes good to me, at least.”

“Wow.” Tristan takes another sip, smaller this time; he doesn’t choke on it, at least, but Alex can see his forehead crease on distaste, can see his mouth curve around the shape of a frown as he shakes his head. “I have terrible taste in beer.”

Alex laughs. It’s an easy sound, spilling up his throat and out into the night; whatever strain has been lingering between his shoulderblades and stopping sincerity in his throat has eased under the chill of the air and the mild intoxication sliding warm through his veins. He sets the bottle next to him, lets the roof take most of the weight while his fingers steady the angle to upright. “I agree,” he says, watching the bottle and not Tristan. “But just at the moment I don’t have much to stand on without being a hypocrite, do I?”

“I suppose not.” Tristan kicks his legs out in front of him, leans back hard on his hands; the force braces at his shoulders and catches the collar of his t-shirt -- of Alex’s t-shirt -- up off his collarbones and against his neck. When he tips his head back his tied-back hair falls away from his shoulders. “What do you like to drink?”

“Wine,” Alex says immediately, his memories intact on this point even if he suspects his tongue would rebel at the sweet weight of even the best wine. “Rum. Whiskey, sometimes, but usually that’s got more of a bite than I like.”

“I like whiskey,” Tristan says contemplatively, staring up at the darkening sky overhead. A few stars are coming into view; Venus is clear on the horizon, visible even through the heavy air of the city and the lingering light of sunset. “Usually mixed with something else, but. Whiskey is good.”

“At last,” Alex says, pulling the words long and sticky as he cuts a grin sideways at Tristan. “Something we agree on.” He leans back in imitation of Tristan’s pose, tips his weight over his elbows to drop him down a few inches lower than the other. He can see the curve of Tristan’s neck like this, can eye the length of his hair without being easily seen. “We should go out for drinks after all this is over.”

Tristan looks back over his shoulder. It’s an awkward angle, Alex can see it twisting along his neck and in the bracing weight of his shoulders, but he doesn’t move back, just stares steadily at Alex over his shoulder like he’s taking stock of something he can’t quite understand.

“I thought you wanted to get rid of me as fast as possible,” he says, slow, like he’s inching his way out onto thin ice and is afraid of a _crack_ from underfoot.

Alex makes a show of frowning, of creasing his forehead like he’s really turning this over in his head. “That’s a good point,” he says, and brings the bottle to his lips more for the look of the thing than because he’s actually swallowing a mouthful of liquid. His lips come away damp and heavy with taste that never makes it to his tongue; he twists the bottle in his fingers, holding Tristan’s gaze as he braces his hold into something just this side of suggestive. “Guess you’ll have to make do with what we have right now.” And he offers the bottle again, extending it with a flourish of his wrist that splashes the liquid hard against the inside of the glass.

Tristan looks at the bottle, looks back at Alex, hesitates. Alex can see the question in his eyes, can watch the statement forming on his tongue, and he doesn’t speak to interrupt it.

“You’re flirting with me,” Tristan says, a statement rather than an accusation.

Alex doesn’t speak, doesn’t move. He holds Tristan’s gaze, maintains the steadiest stare he can manage with the chill of the wind prickling goosebumps over his skin and the heat of the alcohol blistering impulse into his veins, and keeps holding the bottle out like an offering, like a suggestion.

Tristan doesn’t look away when he reaches for the glass. His fingers skim Alex’s, drag over the other’s hold; when he steadies his grip his last two fingers are resting against Alex’s, the stability of his grip sacrificed for the sake of the contact.

Alex waits a long, long moment before he slides his hand away. It’s worth it for the way the movement makes Tristan’s eyelashes flutter into silver.


	16. Chapter 16

Alex wakes to the sound of the doorbell.

It’s a strange experience, as jarring as waking to an unfamiliar sound in an unfamiliar location always is, and exacerbated to intense disorientation by the hangover that crushes against his head as soon as he tries to move. He groans against the pillow under him -- or maybe it’s a rolled-up shirt, it’s hard to tell -- and pushes himself upright in a rush, before he can think the better of it. The room tilts, his vision sways out-of-time with his stomach, and he groans again, picks a spot in the distance to squint at while his brain catches up with the surroundings and recent events to tell him where he is and what he’s doing.

On the couch, turns out to be the answer to the first; on the couch and half-under a sheet, to be specific. Alex stares at the edge of the sheet, rifling through his memories of last night: stumbling inside chill with the wind, swallowing a shot of Monica’s whiskey to prove a point to Tristan that got lost somewhere in the cough that accompanied him swallowing the liquid the wrong way down. It goes hazier after that: collapsing to the couch to shiver until he got up to find an extra set of bedding in the closet after a brief but loud search. Apparently a fitted sheet was the first thing he found, which would explain why his feet are caught in the elastic hemming the bottom edge. It _was_ a pillow he was sleeping on, the uncomfortably ridged texture offset by, yes, a shirt, one of his own though not the one he was wearing last night and still has on.

Tristan offers the answer to where this extra shirt came from. He’s asleep on the floor, his face pressed against a similarly uncomfortable pillow absent any such helpful covering. He’s on his stomach, his bare shoulders flexing with the shift of the arm he has up over his head. Alex remembers that, too, his hazy complaint about the pillow and Tristan laughing, because of _course_ he would be a giggly drunk, peeling off his shirt with the half-formed explanation of “It’s yours anyway, right?” before collapsing to the floor and falling so immediately asleep Alex hadn’t had time to decide what to do about this particular display, hadn’t had time to decide if he wanted to do anything at all. There had been some logic in his head, he remembers vaguely, the thought of pursuing this in the morning after a few hours of rest and before Monica emerged, and then the deep oblivion of intoxicated sleep had closed over him for what appears to be several hours, from the angle of the sun coming through the still-open window.

The doorbell rings again. Alex startles at the sound, his awareness only just catching up to the original cause of his consciousness, and the first rush of epiphany pushes him off the couch and to unsteady feet, stumbling forward over the floor as he miscalculates the distance needed to avoid stepping on Tristan and nearly falls. He catches his balance, catches his composure, and then he’s reaching for the door and pulling it open before he can think better of the action.

Luckily, he is not greeted with an Officer or a stranger or some other official who would be alarmed at a half-asleep man answering the door to an apartment owned in name by a young woman. Instead there’s a blink, and a slow smile, and Daniel says “Hi there Al” as calmly as if his girlfriend’s apartment is regularly inhabited by Alex, which is perhaps not as far from the truth as it might be. “Is Monica up?”

“Hey,” Alex manages to get out of the early-morning roughness clinging to his throat. “Don’t think so.”

“She told me you got yourself tangled up,” Daniel says with an evocative hand gesture and a lingering smile, as if swapping memories with a complete stranger for a few days is a minor accident and not the serious crisis it is in truth. “Thought I’d come by to see how the interface is going.”

“Right,” Alex says, still a little bleary, and then there’s a “Danny!” from behind him, the sound of Monica sounding far more delighted than anyone should with the sun as fresh in the sky as it is. Alex steps out of the way, clearing the pathway to the door without turning, and Monica inserts herself in his place, reaching out to catch both arms around Daniel’s neck as he laughs into a “Morning, babe” that Alex doesn’t wait to see. He looks back into the dim interior of the room instead, to where Tristan is pushing himself up off the floor with a heavy hunch to his shoulders that speaks more clearly than words to the achy exhaustion in his limbs. His hair is a tangle around his face, his motions slow and jerky; when he makes it upright and pushes a hand through his hair Alex notices the weight of his eyelids before his attention wanders to the slide of bare collarbones under the other’s skin.

“Hey,” Alex says, not sure what he’s going to follow that up with but feeling that some kind of greeting is necessary, and Tristan looks up at him for a moment before Monica breaks in.

“Alright you two,” she declares, shoving at Alex’s shoulders with more force than his shaky balance can handle. He stumbles a step forward and Monica follows him, keeping pace with his motion so that even when he straightens her hand is still weighting his back. “Get out.”

Alex doesn’t turn to look at Monica’s expression. He can hear the sincerity in her words, knows her too well to try to protest this. It’s Tristan whose eyes go wider, whose forehead creases on confusion and faint hurt in equal measures. “What?”

“Get out.” Monica lets her hand on Alex’s back fall, leaves him standing a little unsteady on his feet while she leans over Tristan to retrieve the shirt still spread over the pillow at one end of the couch. “Put your shirt on and get out, the both of you.”

“What?” Tristan gets a hand out to catch the shirt Monica drops on him. “Why?”

“Because my boyfriend is here to troubleshoot the interface I’ve spent the last day and a half building for you,” Monica says immediately. “You’re both too hungover to be of any use to us and you managed that on my alcohol, so you should really be willing to do anything I say. Mostly I just want my apartment to myself and _my boyfriend_ before we get back to work, and I’m not enough into exhibitionism to want either of you here.” She lifts an arm and points towards the door. “Out.”

Alex has been watching Tristan. It’s funnier than it should be to watch his cheeks darken with understanding as Monica goes on, better still to see the way his gaze skips to Daniel at the repetition of ‘my boyfriend’; best of all is the way he realizes all at once that he doesn’t have a shirt on and the way he glances from the couch to Alex in the first moment of shock before ducking his head into the collar of the t-shirt to get the fabric back over his bare skin. He’s standing as quickly as he gets dressed, fumbling to his feet with awkward haste, and then Monica is moving towards him to shove against his shoulders too, propelling his unsteady footing directly towards Alex instead of towards the door.

“Go amuse yourselves,” she declares as Alex reaches out instinctively to catch Tristan’s arm and steady him as the other runs into the support of his shoulder. “Eat breakfast, get yourselves a hotel, go back to Al’s place, whatever. Just stay out of this apartment until the afternoon at least.”

“Right,” Alex says, because Tristan is still wobbling somewhat unsteadily against his shoulder and he’s pretty sure the other isn’t in any kind of a position to respond coherently. “Have fun, kids.” He steers Tristan around, turns them both towards the door in immediate obedience to Monica’s demand.

Tristan manages to disentangle himself by the time they reach the entryway. Alex lets him go, tugs on his shoes to the sound of Daniel laughing an introduction and Tristan stumbling through an apology with such an embarrassed flush Alex can hear it in his voice without even looking up. Daniel waves him off with as much gentle politeness as he ever has, and then Monica says “Daniel” like a command and Tristan reaches for his shoes and they are out the door almost before Tristan has the boots on his feet.

It’s cold outside, the wind cutting right through their thin clothes to grate over aching skin and cramp in tender muscles. Alex hisses at the first gust, Tristan gasps, and Alex grabs Tristan’s elbow to steer him down the stairs and towards something warm and ideally caffeinated with as much efficiency as possible.

“We should get something to eat,” he says on the way down, not looking at Tristan and not loosening his hold on the other’s arm. “Remember the names of any restaurants nearby?”

“I--” Tristan starts, and Alex talks over him, his mouth far less willing to give Tristan the chance to speak than he expected.

“There’s this nice place pretty close by,” he says too fast, speaking in a rush of cold and discomfort and awareness of how warm Tristan’s skin is under his fingertips. “They’ll serve you endless pots of tea and they do this thing with eggs and hot sauce that’s really fantastic.”

Tristan glances at him. Alex can see the motion in his periphery, doesn’t turn to meet the other’s eyes. “The one with the breakfasts that are named after old poets?”

“That’s the one,” Alex says with more satisfaction than is necessary under the circumstances. “Remember how to get there?”

“What?” Tristan is looking at Alex now instead of the stairs; his footing isn’t nearly steady enough to justify the risk of inattention, but Alex doesn’t comment on it. “Sure, but can’t you--”

“Don’t remember the street names,” Alex says, and pushes at Tristan’s elbow to urge him on ahead. “You lead the way.”

It’s not a lie. He _can’t_ recall the names, doesn’t even know what street they’re on now, although the information hovers just out-of-reach in the back of his mind whenever he stretches for it. But he’s sure he could walk there by recognition of the streets, could let his body move on autopilot to take them right where they need to go. The problem is that that would require him to fall into step with Tristan, to have the visual of the other looking at him through his hair every time he shifts, to have Tristan’s elbow close enough that the movement of their arms as they walk would bump them together, and with his memories of last night still hazy with sleep and past-tense intoxication that sounds like more of a danger than he would like. Better like this, to claim ignorance he doesn’t actually have, to let Tristan lead the way down the narrow sidewalk with the excuse of following him to let Alex trail at his heels. It’s a much-needed reprieve, with his memories of the night before as hazy as those he borrowed from Tristan; by the time they reach the cafe in question Alex has sorted through what he remembers, is confident enough in his recollection and cold enough in the wind that he takes the lead into the warmth of the interior.

“Booth,” he tells the speaker at the front of the building, and waits until a blue light appears on the map to indicate the next empty space. He turns to find it in the familiar layout of the restaurant, and Tristan follows him, fussing with his hair as he goes until he has it smoothed back into a modicum of tidiness by the time Alex is sliding into his seat.

“It’s fine,” Alex tells him. “You just look hungover, no one is going to judge you for that.”

Tristan looks up at him and raises a skeptical eyebrow. It makes Alex laugh in spite of himself, coughing amusement into the gap between them before he leans back in the booth with a little more ease in the line of his shoulders.

“ _I’m_ not going to judge you for that,” he amends. “Not feeling the way I am, anyway. And I promise I’ll be as judgmental as you like the moment I have the thinnest excuse to be so.”

“Thanks,” Tristan says, letting his hair go and imitating Alex as he relaxes against the seat. “That’s hugely comforting, you have no idea.”

“Don’t try to be deadpan at me,” Alex tells him. “Your facade is shattered, I am never going to take you seriously again after last night.” Tristan goes pink, his cheeks collecting color to stain into red; Alex can feel his own features going darker with the suggestion of embarrassment, but he keeps talking anyway, determined to go through the awkwardness instead of trying to ignore it. “You were _giggling_.”

“I wasn’t,” Tristan says, a rush of self-conscious denial. “I was--” He pauses, his vision dropping out of focus as he thinks; Alex waits for a second, another, waits until the clarity of realization slides over Tristan’s expression.

“You were,” he says, grinning across the table instead of looking down to place the order for the tea he really wants and the coffee that he’ll end up drinking. “I thought you were going to fall off the roof to your death. At least laughter would be a good way to go.”

“You were funny!” Tristan protests, smiling now with the pattern of their interaction. “You were cute and funny and.” He pauses, seemingly realizing what he’s just said, and the flush of self-consciousness goes darker, spreads out from his cheeks to radiate over his entire face. When he ducks his head Alex can even see the color over the tops of his ears, can see the clear contrast of the red against the pale of Tristan’s hair.

“Cute, huh?” Alex says, his voice coming from what sounds like a long way away. “That’s kind of condescending, really. Couldn’t you at least have gone for ‘hot’ or something?”

“You are,” Tristan says, lifting a hand to cover his face.

“Which one?” Alex asks, staring at the curtain Tristan’s hair is making around his face, at the angle of his fingers spread over his expression, at the bracing tension in his wrist. “Cute or hot?”

“Both,” Tristan says against his hand, apparently granted confidence by an excess of embarrassment or by the fact that he’s looking at his fingers instead of at Alex’s face. “Depending on what you’re doing.”

“Really,” Alex drawls, feeling lightheaded, feeling giddy on adrenaline, not sure if he’s panicked or nauseated or euphoric and not able to slow down long enough to find out. He flexes his fingers, wishing he had something in his hands, cracks his knuckles with enough aggression that he gets three to pop at once. “What about now?”

Tristan looks up. He’s still red, still so flushed with embarrassment it’s hard to look at him, but he manages eye contact, manages even to hold it for a moment as he looks Alex over. Alex can feel the mania of his grin fade, can feel his own skin going hot under Tristan’s consideration; there’s adrenaline prickling along his spine, electricity like a modification he never asked for short-circuiting his thoughts into strained expectation. Tristan considers his eyes, his mouth, the line of his nose; there’s a lingering stare at his earrings, a drag over his shoulders, and then his gaze slides over Alex’s arms and down to the angle of his wrists at the table, to the braced-out tension of his fingers, and Alex can see the way Tristan’s throat works on a swallow, can hear the way his breathing catches in his chest.

“Hot,” he says, so certain Alex can’t even hear embarrassment under the word anymore. “Definitely.”

Alex takes a breath. “Okay,” he says, aware as he speaks that his voice is shaking, that he couldn’t stop it even if he tried. “Good to know your taste runs towards half-asleep and hungover.” He slides his hands back off the table, over the edge and into his lap where Tristan can’t keep staring at them like he is; he intends it to be subtle, but from the look Tristan gives him across the table this is exactly as much of a failure as he expected it to be. He ducks his head, capitulating to a habit that tells him to dip his features behind the curtain of the hair currently tied back with Tristan’s elastic. “You want tea.”

“Okay,” Tristan agrees. “You probably want coffee.”

They order, and then they drink, and shortly after the ache of Alex’s caffeine headache has started to fade the food arrives to give him sustenance against the hangover nausea that makes everything look unappetizing and taste delicious. The conversation is minimal and casual, deliberately so; by the time they’ve started in on the second round of caffeine, Alex can almost convince himself he’s not feeling self-conscious about every move he takes.

Tristan still watches his hands every time he moves.


	17. Chapter 17

Alex fills most of the silence on the walk back. Conversation eased into comfort at the restaurant as they both worked their way through headaches and hunger alike; by the time the morning has shifted itself towards afternoon they’re both smiling again, all the adrenaline in Alex’s veins converting itself into pleasant excitement instead of the cold chill of impending crisis that it seemed before. Three hours after they arrive Alex finally allows that they’ll need to brave the cold again; with another hour to go before the promised afternoon he takes Tristan through the city, wandering down streets with familiar appearances and unknown names, gesturing to dark corners or abandoned alleyways with stories either recollection or invention. After a half hour of this Tristan starts in on it too, telling Alex about pieces of his own history he doesn’t remember and can’t be sure are true; when Alex narrows his eyes and asks if Tristan’s making it up the other just smiles to give a tiny quirk at the corner of his mouth that is no kind of answer at all.

“Seriously,” Alex says as they pause at one of the landings halfway to Monica’s apartment, the cold of the wind entirely counteracted by the effort of the exercise. “You made up the one with the lighter.”

Tristan shakes his head and ducks his chin to smile at the corrugated metal under them. “Did not.”

“I don’t believe you,” Alex informs him, turning to climb another spiral of stairs leading up to another floor. “I have done some stupid stuff that I can remember and none of it is as bad as lighting my own shirt on fire.”

“You were trying to win an argument,” Tristan informs him as he trails in Alex’s wake. “About how flammable the rum you were drinking was.”

“Damn,” Alex sighs. “That _does_ sound like something I would do. Did I win, at least?”

“You singed off an eyebrow and burnt your hands so badly you couldn’t hold a keyboard for a week.”

“Shame,” Alex says, cutting a glance back in Tristan’s direction. “I’ve been told my hands are my best feature.”

Tristan colors. “I never said that.” He takes a pair of stairs at once, the added velocity catching him up so close to Alex his shoulder bumps against the other’s elbow. “I said I liked your hands, I didn’t rate them against your other features.”

Alex’s eyebrows go up, his mouth tugging into a startled smile; Tristan is watching his feet, his head ducked down so his hair catches in front of his face, but Alex can imagine the color in his cheeks, can picture the curve of the mouth he can’t see.

“Maybe you should fix that,” he suggests, turning his attention back to what he’s doing as they round the corner to the final landing. “For purely scientific purposes, of course.”

“Of course,” Tristan deadpans, and Alex grins and takes the last few stairs in a rush so he’s ringing the bell for Monica’s apartment while Tristan is still climbing.

Monica answers sooner than he expects. She’s smiling, her expression easy and glowing with good news; it’s enough to make Alex grin just in echo of her happiness even before she’s started speaking.

“Good news,” she offers, leaving the door open behind her for Alex and Tristan to make their way inside. “Daniel looked over the program and he says it’s good.”

“It’s perfect,” Daniel says from the kitchen where he’s pouring himself a cup of coffee. “As Monica should know by now, because everything she makes is perfect.”

“It is not,” Monica says, the retort sliding into the easy rhythm of a familiar round of banter. “And an extra pair of eyes is always good, especially when we’re fucking with this kind of thing.” She reaches out to rest a hand on the dark outline of the reworked interface, turns to consider Alex and Tristan in the doorway. “All we need now is a good night’s rest for me, and we can pull you two back apart in the morning.”

Alex’s mouth relaxes, the tension of his smile giving way to the understanding of Monica’s words. Tristan has gone perfectly still beside him. “Oh,” he says; then, with an effort: “Good. That’s awesome.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Monica apologizes. “But I’m going to have to do a manual check on the filtering once you’re under, and I don’t want to make any stupid mistakes because I’ve been working nonstop for two days on this thing.”

“It’s fine,” Alex hears himself saying, feels his mouth dragging into a smile sharp with the edge of stress, like he might start laughing and not be able to catch himself back from toppling over the edge into hysteria. “It’s not a big deal, we can wait one more night.”

“It’s been less than a week,” Daniel adds. “You’ll have a little disorientation but as long as everything works the way it’s supposed to you should both be fine within a couple of hours.”

“That’s great,” Alex says again. He flexes his hand at his side, feels the flat edge of his fingernails pressing against his palms. His headache is back, pressure rising against his temples with the threat of a migraine on the horizon. The sunlight from the window seems oppressive all at once, the light aching in his eyes and weighting against his mind with the awareness of time passing, of days lost, of the ever-proceeding movement towards tomorrow. There’s still the afternoon ahead of them, hours of time to be filled or wasted before they try the interface in the morning, but:

“I’m going to lie down,” he says abruptly, turning towards the hallway and stepping out of range of the brush of Tristan’s sleeve against his. It feels like a relief and a loss at once. “Try to sleep off my hangover.”

“You only got up a few hours ago,” Daniel says, sounding a little confused and mostly concerned. “Are you okay?”

“It’s the headache,” Alex says without turning around, aware even as he speaks that he’s being short with Daniel who deserves it least of anyone, aware that that cutting edge of irritation is more for the ache in his own head than for anything anyone else has done. “I just need to be in the quiet and the dark for a while.”

No one else tries to stop him. He shuts the door behind him, locks it even though it’s Monica’s room and not his own; he needs the reassurance of a barrier, needs the protection of a wall between himself and the lingering heat of Tristan watching him go. He sheds his shirt, socks, jeans, strips himself down to boxers and climbs into the bed without taking the time to indulge in guilt at taking over Monica’s room for the entirety of the afternoon. His head hurts less in the dark interior of the bedroom, and when he presses a pillow down over his head he can’t even hear the faint murmur of voices from the other room. There’s just the dark behind his shut eyes, the ringing of his ears to fill the silence, and the physical pain of his headache thrumming inside his skull.

It’s easier to think about the pain than anything else.


	18. Chapter 18

The apartment is quiet when Alex wakes up.

He’s bleary from oversleeping, his movements uncoordinated and jerky as he struggles back into his clothes. He waits by the door for several long minutes, listening for the murmur of voices or any sound at all to indicate there’s someone else in the apartment; but there’s nothing, just quiet and dark and the gentle glow from the clock over the door to reassure him of how late it is, and finally he opens the door and pads down the hallway to the rest of the apartment.

It’s just as quiet in the living room as it sounded from the bedroom. The lights are off, the furniture unoccupied; the entire space looks abandoned, as isolated as if this is Alex’s apartment, as if he is as alone here as he was before this mess started. He stands still in the entrance to the living room, staring at the vague shapes of the surroundings as his eyes adjust to the dim lighting; then there’s a flutter of movement, a breeze catching against the edge of the loose papers stacked on the desk, and when Alex looks the window is open by an inch.

He can see who it is before he’s worked the glass up and open. The blond hair is a giveaway all by itself, the night-bleached color of Alex’s t-shirt unneeded backup; Tristan has a bottle in his hand, a strange delayed echo of Alex’s own position yesterday, and he’s looking up towards the sky and doesn’t look away even as Alex gets the window open and pushes himself up and over the ledge.

“You stole my idea,” is the first thing Alex says, the words aggressive but his tone gentler than he intends, as if the glow of the moonlight is sapping the anger from his tone as thoroughly as it strips the color from Tristan’s hair.

“Yeah,” Tristan says and offers the bottle without looking. Alex takes it, careful with his hold; his fingers don’t touch Tristan’s but his wrist does, bumping for a moment of heat against the other’s skin. He doesn’t drink.

“Where did Monica and Daniel go?” he asks, bracing his fingers against the neck of the bottle and staring at the angle they make against the glass.

“They left,” Tristan says, still gazing up at the sky. “To Daniel’s apartment, I think. Monica wasn’t happy about you taking her bedroom.”

Alex grins, a shudder of amusement making it past the frayed tension he can feel strain over him with every inhale. “Yeah,” he says, and he does take a drink from the bottle, then, feels the heat of what turns out to be wine slide over his tongue and down his throat. “I’ll have to deal with that later.”

“I’m sorry,” Tristan offers, sounding so calm and focused on the word that it takes Alex a moment to realize how much of a non-sequitur it is. “I would have gone if I had anywhere else to go.”

“Can’t find your way back home from here?” Alex asks, attempting a taunt that slides sideways into sincerity before he can stop himself with another overlong swallow. Tristan’s forehead creases, his mouth shifts into a frown, but he still doesn’t look at Alex.

“I don’t mind,” Alex says, and he’s the one to look away this time, tipping his head to watch his fingers on the bottle before he can see if Tristan has turned to see him. “We’re stuck in this together for now.”

“Until tomorrow,” Tristan says, very quietly and very softly.

“Until tomorrow.” Alex thinks about taking another drink. He doesn’t. He turns the bottle instead, twists the glass under his fingers while the pause between them goes long and taut with expectation, with possibility, with bad ideas and the excuse of intoxication.

He can hear the inhale Tristan takes. It’s longer than it needs to be, drawn out to such lengths it’s an offer, a suggestion, the edge of a cliff coming for them both. “Alexei--”

“I lied,” Alex says, fast, cutting off whatever Tristan was about to offer. The silence gains traction again, draws taut; Alex doesn’t need to look up to know that Tristan is looking at him now, is staring confusion at him while he refuses to meet the other’s gaze.

He takes a breath of his own, lets it out all at once. When he looks up it’s deliberate, a slow tilt of his head so he can catch and hold Tristan’s gaze with his own.

“About you not being pretty,” he says, slowly, like this will grant Tristan the ability to backtrack and understand the meaning of his sentence. Tristan’s head tilts, the crease in his forehead deepening, and Alex wants to laugh, can feel hysterical amusement pressing against his ribcage before he chokes it back through sheer force of will. “I’ve always been a sucker for blonds.”

Alex doesn’t wait for Tristan’s expression to clear into understanding, doesn’t linger for the sunrise of epiphany to break over the other’s features. If he waits he won’t act, if he pauses he’ll think better of this, and so he moves all at once, while Tristan is still looking blank as he pieces out the offer laid under Alex’s words. His arm reaches out, his wrist fitting at Tristan’s shoulder as easily as his fingers fit into moonlight-pale hair, and he’s-- but Tristan’s moving too, moving faster than Alex expected, has a hand up and out and curling against the back of his neck and when they come together it’s Tristan who crosses the gap, who holds Alex in place with a hand at his neck and crushes his lips to the other’s.

“ _Oh_ ,” Alex says against the heat of Tristan’s mouth. “ _Fuck_ ” and he lets his hold on the bottle go, grabbing for Tristan’s shoulder instead as a better point of reference. There’s a skid of sound, glass slipping over metal as gravity drags the bottle over the roof and off the edge, but Alex doesn’t think about it, doesn’t even listen for the inevitable crash of glass shattering against the street far below them. He’s not thinking about anything at all, can’t hear anything around them for the hiss of Tristan’s breathing running suddenly hot against his mouth, and when Tristan draws back enough to manage “Shit, was that the--” Alex fists his hand into the other’s hair and drags him in for another round of distraction.

They fit together well. Alex knew they would; borrowed memories make for compatible habits, he’s sure, knew that this would be as easy as the way their strides align when they’re walking on the street or the way they end up reaching for the same thing at the same time, Alex’s wrist an echo of Tristan’s and Tristan’s hand a cousin to Alex’s. It’s still overwhelming, even with the expectation of compatibility, uncanny to have Tristan’s knee fitting smoothly between Alex’s thighs and weird to know right where to drag his fingers over Tristan’s scalp to pull a shuddering groan from the other’s throat. Tristan’s pinning him down, his hands in Alex’s hair and clinging to his shoulder, but Alex is dragging at him just as hard, between the fistful he has of pale hair and the fingers he’s shoved up under Tristan’s shirt to brace indecently low against the other’s hip. Tristan tastes like heat, the wine clinging to his tongue enough to slur heavy sweet into Alex’s mouth, and he feels just as impossibly warm, from the catch of his fingers at Alex’s neck to the deliberate rocking pressure of his knee as he grinds up against Alex’s jeans. Alex tightens his hold at Tristan’s hips, dips his fingertips under the waistband of the other’s clothes, and Tristan makes a weird, desperate sound, offering a shudder of heat to match the full-body tremor that pulls his mouth away from Alex’s, that arches his back into a moment of unstudied pressure against Alex’s body.

“Fuck,” Alex grates, and pushes his hand down farther, under the weight of denim and shoving hard over bare skin until he can dig his fingers in against Tristan’s ass, can drag him down with all the strength he can muster from the odd angle of their position. Tristan whines at the pressure, gasping for air like he’s forgotten how to breathe, and when he rocks his hips forward it’s with deliberate force to grind hard against the resistance of Alex’s hip.

“You’re unbelievable,” Alex tells him, turning his head so he can breathe the words against Tristan’s ear, can let the heat of his exhale gust hot over the other’s skin. “We’re on a _roof_ , you really want to do this?”

“We could go inside,” Tristan suggests, but he doesn’t lift his head from where he has it braced at Alex’s shoulder. “The bedroom, or the couch--”

“No,” Alex says, aware as he says it that he’s being mercurial and not caring any more than Tristan will. “No, if you want this we’re doing it right here, right now.” He digs his fingers in harder, deep enough to be painful, and Tristan groans against his shoulder again. He’s so hard Alex can feel the heat of him through both their jeans, can feel the pressure of his cock digging a line of radiance at his hip. “And you want this.”

“I do,” Tristan says, and Alex arches his back, rocks his hips up to shove hard against the other. Tristan chokes, shifts, grinds himself in against Alex’s body with the fluid elegance of reflex. “I want you.”

“It wasn’t a question,” Alex informs him, and slides his hand free of Tristan’s jeans so he can shove against the rooftop instead. Tristan’s flush with his body, bracing himself against Alex’s shoulders instead of the roof itself; it’s easy to get enough force to tip them sideways, to send them both sprawling over the metal with Alex leaning in over Tristan instead of the other way around. Tristan makes a faint noise of panic as he falls, his hands clutching hard at Alex’s hair; his eyes blow wide on adrenaline, on panic enough to override the heat turning his expression slack and heavy with desire for a moment.

“It’s fine,” Alex informs him, crushing a kiss against Tristan’s mouth now that he can push harder and pin him down against the rooftop. “You’re not going to fall if you’re lying down.”

“Okay,” Tristan says, his voice quavering in his throat. His fingers ease on Alex’s hair, slide down to cling to the back of his neck instead; Alex can feel them tense as he braces himself on one hand so he can push the other against the front of Tristan’s jeans, can feel the tremor of anticipation in the other’s body as much as he can see the way Tristan’s eyelashes flutter to track the movement of his hand. “ _God_.”

“Just hold still,” Alex tells him, unbuttoning Tristan’s jeans without looking, without pulling his gaze away from the other’s face or from the dark of his eyes as he watches Alex dragging his clothes open. “Don’t wiggle around too much.”

“What are you--” Tristan starts to ask, but Alex gets his zipper open and presses his palm in against the thin fabric of the other’s boxers, offering friction and pressure to stall the question in Tristan’s throat.

“Shut up,” Alex says, glancing back to gauge the distance to the edge of the roof. It’s a few feet still, enough for him to slide backwards without much concern; Tristan seems to disagree, from the sound of panic he offers as Alex moves and the way his hands seize tight on the other’s hair, but Alex just shakes him off and moves back by another foot.

“You’re going to fall,” Tristan frets, still clinging with painful intensity to Alex’s hair as the other lowers his weight closer to the roof and draws his hand back from Tristan’s clothes to push his knee wider instead.

“I’m not,” Alex says, sharp with certainty. He _is_ close to the edge -- if he stretches his leg out his toes slide over the lip, his foot is left to dangle in midair -- but he’s sprawled on his stomach too, with the friction of the roof to keep him in place as much as the hold he’s steadying on Tristan’s hip. “I’m safer than you are, just stop worrying.” He curls his fingers under the other’s clothes, drags them down by a few inches while Tristan gasps himself into a whimper, while Tristan’s hold flexes into the desperation of desire in his hair. “And try not to move.”

“I’ll try,” Tristan says, but Alex isn’t really listening anymore. He’s got Tristan’s jeans off his hips and halfway down his thighs; he can see how tense he is, can watch the tremor of anticipation catch along the other’s legs, but he doesn’t bother pausing to stare because Tristan’s hard, too, his cock flushed so dark Alex can make out the shadow of the color even in the low light. He ducks close, breathes hard over the head, and Tristan’s spine curves, his back arching to lift him off the rooftop and closer to Alex’s mouth. There’s a sound in his throat, something half-formed that might be a plea and might be Alex’s name, and Alex slides down and over him all at once, without offering any kind of warning. Tristan is hot at his lips, bitter on his tongue, but mostly Tristan is moving, his whole body tensing as he bucks up with a shuddering whimper that Alex can feel spark heat all down his spine.

Alex draws back, licks against his lower lip. “Hold _still_ ,” he says, snapping it like an order, but when he comes back down Tristan is already curving to meet him, making the shape of his body into an offer and a plea at the same time. He slides over Alex’s tongue, far back in his mouth as soon as Alex touches lips to skin, and Alex has to grab at Tristan’s hips, has to rock himself forward and up to pin the other down with the full weight of his body to hold him still. His fingers dig into skin, promise side-effect bruises within the hour, but Tristan doesn’t protest, doesn’t even flinch; all his motion is spent in the tremble of his legs along the spread-open angle they’re making to allow for Alex’s shoulders, all his breathing given over to groans whenever Alex licks against the head of his cock or tighten his lips to suck a hard drag of friction over the other. Alex’s mouth is full of the taste of salt, his thoughts spinning wild until he’s not sure whose memory it is that he reaches for to find the tilt of his chin to change the angle of his mouth, doesn’t know if it’s his preference or Tristan’s that says to come in farther, deeper, as far as he can go before he draws back in a deliberately slow drag of lips and tongue and heat. Tristan is shaking, his foot catching and bracing itself to tension against the roof, and Alex is sure he’ll feel the strain of the position later but right now he’s just panting through anticipation, dragging at Alex’s hair as his voice goes ragged and his cock goes hotter, and then: “ _Alexei_ ” as he comes, shuddering himself into pleasure as Alex pins him down and to some reasonable approximation of stillness. The tension in his leg gives way, his knee falling wider as his body shivers through his orgasm, and Alex stays where he is, swallowing salt off his tongue and letting Tristan pant for breath until the last jolts of sensation have subsided and Alex can pull away and lick the bitter damp off his lips.

Tristan’s staring at Alex when he looks back up. His hands are still in the other’s hair, some of the desperate tension in them eased to gentleness while the hold stays steady, but his eyes are enormous, wide with shock and disbelief and pleasure tangled inextricably together. He swallows hard, takes a breath. “Alexei,” he starts, and Alex pushes himself up over the angle of the roof, dragging hard at his hold on Tristan’s hip to achieve the maneuver.

“Shut up,” he says, but the command is stripped of its teeth by the shudder in his voice and the way his shoulders are quivering with the unresolved desire jolting electricity down his spine and into his veins. He braces one hand over Tristan’s shoulder, holds himself up with the support so he can free his other to unfasten the buttons of his own jeans. “Just stay quiet and hold still.” He gets his pants open, shoves the cloth down off one hip to give himself the leeway he needs, and Tristan’s dark-blown eyes dip down to the space between them to track the motion of Alex closing his fingers around himself.

“ _Oh_ ,” Tristan says, and “ _God_ ,” Alex finishes, and he’s moving fast immediately, jerking himself off with quick, sharp-angled strokes of his wrist. The sensation is too much with no lead-in but the friction of his jeans, but it feels good, the ache of the sudden strain between his shoulderblades and along his spine is satisfying like the taste of the wine on Tristan’s tongue. Alex shifts his arm, braces himself on his forearm instead, and Tristan whimpers encouragement as Alex catches the other’s lip between his teeth to drag and bite heat against the soft of it. Tristan is still shuddering through his breathing, Alex can feel it from how close-up they are; his fingers are catching against the edge of the shirt between them on each stroke, the slick of precome collecting at his fingers clinging to the fabric with each drag of his hand. Every motion is short-circuiting something in Alex’s brain, overriding any kind of self-consciousness or restraint he might otherwise feel into the overheated rush of oncoming pleasure and flushing all his skin hotter in direct defiance of the cool of the air.

“Tristan,” Alex says, grating the syllables over Tristan’s lips like some kind of aggressive kiss. “Push your shirt up.”

Tristan obeys. He doesn’t even hesitate, doesn’t ask why Alex is making the demand; he just moves, his fingers pushing the fabric up to bare his skin as his knuckles brush against Alex’s chest where the other is leaning over him. Alex looks down, shifts his weight by an inch, and when he strokes next it’s Tristan’s skin under the motion, it’s the warmth of the other’s body that catches against his fingers as he drags over himself.

“Fuck,” he says, feeling his legs tensing, feeling anticipation forming itself to inevitability low in his stomach. “You’re so _fucking_ hot,” and the pleasure catches up to the pull of his grip around himself, jolts along his spine and up to override his coherency as he groans and spills sticky over Tristan’s bare stomach. He’s tipped in close, his hair catching against Tristan’s lips when he ducks his head, and he can’t stop the tiny shuddering notes of reaction in his throat, the half-formed moans that topple one over the other as each fresh wave of sensation hits him. Tristan’s holding to his hair, is breathing hard at the top of his head, and for a long moment Alex doesn’t let himself think about anything, just shuts his eyes and lets his breathing shiver itself from the strain of pleasure to the slow pace of satisfaction.

When he opens his eyes Tristan is watching him. The moonlight is brighter than Alex remembers, or maybe it’s just his eyes adjusting to the dim; it seems more than enough, now, when it lets him see the shadows of Tristan’s lashes against his skin and track the shape of pleasure still clinging heavy to the curve of the other’s lower lip. He doesn’t try to say anything, for once. He just stares, his eyes wide and his mouth soft, looking at Alex like he’s never seen him before, except that maybe he’s been looking at him like that for days, maybe it’s just now that Alex is admitting to seeing it.

Alex leans in to fit his lips to Tristan’s and shuts his eyes again.


	19. Chapter 19

“Hey.”

Alex stirs, drawn out of unconsciousness and to awareness by the sound of a familiar voice. He frowns without opening his eyes, turns his head down against the pillow under him. The texture drags across his skin.

“ _Hey_.” A hand, a tug at his shoulder; the shake rattles him, upsetting his equilibrium, and he groans as he jolts into awareness, as he places the voice as Monica’s. “Wake up.”

“Yeah,” Alex says, and rolls over onto his back. He’s back on the couch, he realizes as he moves, the pillow under him the same one from yesterday. “I’m awake.” Monica is standing over him when he opens his eyes, looking down at him with a raised eyebrow. Alex blinks, tries to order his thoughts into enough clarity to muster the words for a coherent response. “What is it?”

“Sorry to wake you from your beauty sleep,” Monica drawls, sounding not at all sorry. “We’re ready to give the interface a try.”

Alex’s blood goes cold, his eyes going wide as his memory snaps into place to remind him of the plan for the day. “ _Oh_.” He pushes upright, looks out the window; it’s tomorrow, and well into it, the sunlight mid-morning gold as it comes through the window. “Is Tristan--”

“Over there,” Monica tells him, jerking her head towards the wall behind the couch. Alex glances sideways to where Daniel is urging Tristan awake with far more care than Monica showed him; he can see Tristan lift an arm over his face, can see him start to shift into consciousness, and looks away before he can fumble into eye contact. “I thought you’d both be up already. Did you keep each other awake too late last night?”

It’s teasing, Alex knows. Monica is grinning at him, amused laughter at her lips in spite of the edge on the expression, and he supposes he deserves it, too, for how touchy he’s been about the entire topic. But instead of laughing, or escalating with a raised eyebrow and a smirk of his own, what he says is “Drop it,” in a low undertone he hopes indicates his sincerity as much as his inability to deal with this topic just at the moment.

Monica’s grin evaporates. She looks back up across the room at Tristan; it’s only for a moment, but Alex sincerely hopes Tristan didn’t happen to see the expression she’s wearing, the wide-eyed stare of curiosity verging onto pity as she processes the implication of Alex’s words.

“You didn’t,” she says, soft and a little awestruck as if she doesn’t truly believe what she’s saying.

“Let’s get this over with,” Alex says instead of answering, and turns himself sideways so he can push to his feet. Monica is staring at him, now, that same expression the worse for how near she is; his spine prickles with self-consciousness, his cheeks go dark in embarrassment.

“We can wait,” she says in a rushed undertone too quiet to be heard except by the two of them. “I could get you another day or two if you--”

“We’re _doing it_ ,” Alex says, more harshly than he intends, and moves past Monica without meeting her eyes or offering an apology. That can come later, after this is over, after the knot in his chest has been cut through and left to disintegrate. “You said you’d be ready today. Aren’t you?”

“ _I_ am,” Monica says, her voice sharp on defensiveness for Alex’s implication. “Are you two?”

“I’m ready,” Alex says, and drags the chair back from the desk without looking up at Tristan stepping forward into his periphery. “I just want to get this over with and get on with my life.”

Tristan doesn’t say anything. He hesitates over the chair next to Alex’s, clearly uncertain how close he should sit; it’s not until Alex reaches out without making eye contact to drag it back in irritated invitation that he moves with as much speed as if he can undo his own hesitation by acceleration. Alex doesn’t look at him, doesn’t offer to help him with the other interface cable; he just plugs his own in, more roughly than he should, and lets the crackle of electricity jolt over him before he’s quite ready. In his periphery Tristan is handling his own, pushing his hair back and fitting the plug in behind his ear with far more grace than he showed the last time he attempted this maneuver. Alex can remember the way his hair felt during their last try at this, can remember how warm his skin was as he braced his fingers behind Tristan’s ear and slid the plug into place, and his memory skids out on the thought, falls into the fit of Tristan’s lips to his, the salt-bitter clinging to his tongue as he drew away from the shudder of pleasure in the other’s body, the friction of his knuckles against Tristan’s stomach--

“This is going to take a few minutes,” Monica says as she draws back the chair on the other side of the desk and drops to sit in it. The interruption derails Alex’s recollections, snapping him back to the present, and far better gives him something to focus on, a central point to think about while he shoves back the memories that are proving far more resilient than he is able to handle. “I’ll go as fast as I can, but you’re both going to be out cold while I’m working. We’ll shut everything down and bring you back around as soon as we’re done.”

“I know,” Alex snaps, even though he’s aware much of this explanation is for Tristan’s benefit and not his own, that his rejection of the words is a slap to Tristan more than to Monica. “Just _do_ it already.”

“Fine,” Monica says, reaching out over the interface for one of the two power buttons. “Better get comfortable.” She’s pushing the button before either of them have a chance to move; for an endless heartbeat Alex is frozen expecting a rush of electricity that doesn’t come. Then there’s a shuddering exhale from beside him, Tristan arching in his chair as the interface takes over his awareness, and Alex is turning to look at him even though he didn’t intend to, is reaching out with instinctive support as Tristan’s head goes back, as his mouth falls open on wide-eyed shock in the moment before he falls limp to the support of the chair.

“Fuck,” Alex says, and then Monica pushes the other button and it’s his turn to seize up with the involuntary reaction to the interface, his muscles cramping for a moment as his thoughts jerk sideways and out from his awareness. Everything goes white, then black, and then he’s gasping, coming back up to consciousness without a discernable gap in time.

“Told you he’d be back first,” a voice -- Monica’s -- says from over him. “Al, how you feeling?”

“Sore,” Alex manages. The world has turned itself sideways; gravity shifted in the moment his vision was black. “Am I on the floor?”

“You fell,” Monica says. “I told Daniel to keep Tristan in his chair.”

“Fuck you,” Alex says, his vision fading to white and then clarifying again, a slow swirl of color reorienting itself as his mind takes over its own functions again. He can _feel_ the difference, can feel the pieces of his history slotting together into a cohesive whole, but still: “Did it work?”

“Perfectly,” Monica says. When Alex blinks his vision focuses, steadies, holds. “Six minutes forty-two seconds, give or take a minute for your boyfriend to come to.”

“He’s still out?” Alex asks, the question more rhetorical than sincere. “Good.” He braces his hand on the floor and pushes himself upright; the movement blurs his vision and aches in his temples, but it gets him closer to vertical where he wants to be. “Take him outside as soon as he’s conscious again. While he’s still dizzy.”

There’s a pause, silence loaded with judgment Monica isn’t forming to words. “I don’t think--”

“If you take him out a few blocks he won’t be able to find his way back,” Alex says, twisting to get his weight over his knees and reaching out to the chair to pull himself to his feet. “His own memories can get him home safely enough.”

There’s a touch at Alex’s arm, a hold as much restraint as it is support. “You should at least talk to him first,” Monica says, her voice radiating enough concern that Alex doesn’t need to see her face to guess at her expression. “You can’t just dump him on the street without even saying goodbye.”

“No, I can’t,” Alex agrees, staring hard at the floor and willing his vision to clear. It’s working, slowly. “That’s why I need you to do it.”

There’s a pause. Monica’s hand tightens on his arm, her grip bruising prints into Alex’s skin; then there’s a sound behind them, an inhale from Tristan as he starts to come to, and Monica lets go and turns away.

Alex manages to make it down the hall and into the bedroom before his balance gives out on him. Once he’s kicked the door shut, he can’t make out individual voices from the murmur of sound on the other side.

It’s less comfort than he’d hoped.


	20. Chapter 20

It takes Monica some time to return. Alex ventures out of the bedroom fifteen minutes after the sound of conversation dies to silence with the sound of the front door opening and closing; Daniel is still in the living room, tinkering with the wiring of the interface, but he looks at Alex’s face and contents himself with a nod of greeting instead of something more coherent. Alex is grateful for this small mercy, and the more grateful when Daniel stretches a half hour later and declares “I’m heading out to work. See you later, Al,” and leaves Alex to lie across Monica’s couch and stare at the ceiling with sufficient attention that any unpleasant mental considerations he has are kept to a minimum.

The sound of the lock unfastening is all the greeting Monica gives. No sooner is the door open than she says, “You shouldn’t have slept with him,” with condemnation heavy in her tone.

“Fuck,” Alex says to the ceiling, because his precarious grasp on tranquility is shattered just by the statement, his imagination is suddenly veering towards the sound of his name gasped in low, breathless tones, to the sheen of moonlight over sweat-slick skin. “I know.”

“What the fuck _possessed_ you?” Monica demands. She’s kicking her shoes off, letting the door swing shut behind her; she beelines for the kitchen instead of the couch, sparing Alex from the full force of her glare for the short term. “You had _one night_ , if you weren’t going to keep him you should have kept your distance.”

Alex tips his head back to watch Monica from upside-down. It’s strangely soothing to have the world inverted in his vision, like he’s watching a movie instead of actually living through the reality formed by his own poor decisions. “I know,” he says, because he does know, and he knew last night, and there has been no point when any of this seemed like anything other than an impulsive mistake. “I just wanted--” He pauses, breaks off for lack of a noun; the hesitation hangs heavy in the air, Monica abandoning him to the pressure of his own statement without offering the assistance of a suggestion.

“To take advantage of it,” Alex finally finishes somewhat lamely, feeling the words twist into dissatisfying weakness even as he says them. “Of him wanting me, and me wanting him, before we were ourselves again and the opportunity was gone.”

“Makes sense,” Monica says with deceptive calm in her voice, and Alex braces himself for the cutting edge of sarcasm to follow. “Because now that you have your memories back you _definitely_ don’t want him at all, right?”

“Fuck,” Alex says again, and shuts his eyes to the world entirely.

“You’re an idiot,” Monica informs him, a little more gently. There’s the sound of glass on glass, a _clink_ of contact between two surfaces. Alex still doesn’t open his eyes, even at the splash of pouring liquid that follow shortly thereafter. “Why didn’t you just let him stay?”

“It was a bad idea,” Alex says, even though it feels like a weak excuse, like it’s threadbare and fraying even as he hears the words. “He obeys the Security Office, he’s an _upstanding member of society_.” His voice twists the words into a mockery, distaste for the Office ground so deep into him that it overrides even his own immediate misery. “He would have been in more trouble than he knew with me.”

“He’s implicated already,” Monica point out from the kitchen. “He’d recognize your face if he saw you again. He’s going to be a liability even as it stands.”

“Then I’ll just make sure he doesn’t see me,” Alex says, as harsh on the statement as if he’s swearing by it.

There’s the sound of footsteps, Monica padding her way over from the kitchen, and then cool against Alex’s skin as glass bumps against his cheek. When he opens his eyes Monica’s standing over him, a wineglass in her hand so she can tap the base of it against Alex’s face to get his attention.

“I still think you’re an idiot,” she tells him as he reaches to accept the glass and sit up. “You could have tied him to your bed and brainwashed him into compliance. You missed a golden opportunity there, Al.”

“It’s not even noon,” Alex protests without force as he tips the glass back and swallows a mouthful of liquid. It’s cool going down, the alcohol enough to hum heat over his tongue in its wake and to wash a little of the electronic bitterness off his lips. “Are you seriously suggesting I kept him as some kind of sex slave?”

Monica shrugs, a tilt of her shoulder that manages to write an entire novel of erotic possibilities. “I could think of some good arguments for it,” she says, drawling the words into suggestion; then she smiles, the expression softening her stare into something less weighted with implication and far closer to the sympathy Alex isn’t sure he even wants right now. “Joking aside, you could have done something else.”

Alex looks away from Monica’s face, away from the sympathy in her eyes and the gentleness in her smile. The wine in the glass is dark, the flavor heavy and clinging to his tongue; it’s not enough to offer an explanation for the tension knotting into his throat.

“Could he find his way back?” he asks without looking up, watching his reflection distort on the shifting surface of the liquid. “If he tried?”

“No,” Monica says, that one word heavy with certainty. “I took him in circles and left him still dizzy. There’s no way he’ll be able to find you on his own.”

Alex sets his jaw. “Good,” he says, and swallows another mouthful of alcohol to heat the ache in his chest.


	21. Chapter 21

Monica is more patient than Alex expects her to be. In the past she’s been ruthless, ready to evict him from her couch at a moment’s notice, sometimes without even giving him time to find his shoes, especially if Daniel has the time to drop by after work or on a long afternoon break. It’s a testament to how sympathetic she’s feeling, Alex thinks, that this time she lets him stay a full three days without protest, that she doesn’t comment on his aimless tinkering with the now-useless mental interface and doesn’t complain about how much of her wine he’s going through. It’s more than he expected, more than he knows he should be taking advantage of, so when the breaking point comes he’s more relieved than upset.

“Okay.” The voice is loud, at a volume that cuts through Alex’s restless sleep and the ache of his hangover-headache at the same time; he groans into the couch cushion, shifts to roll onto his back, and by the time he’s got his eyes open Monica is standing at the foot of the couch, arms crossed and mouth set into flatline determination. “Enough.”

“What?” Alex manages, because he was expecting this in the general sense but he’s also got a hell of a headache and it’s a little bit difficult to follow the conversation as it’s happening.

“Enough.” Monica bends over to pick up Alex’s jacket and throw it at his face. His reflexes are slow, barely enough get his hands up to keep the weight from hitting his face directly and not at all in time to save him from the shadow of it falling over him. “Enough moping. Either get out and get on with your life or admit you made a mistake and go _find_ him. I’m done with you pouting over the mess you caused yourself.”

“I’m not _pouting_ ,” Alex insists as he pushes the jacket down to his legs and forces himself upright. His head spins with the motion but he doesn’t collapse back to the couch as sounds best; he’s too busy pulling his expression into an approximation of a glare for Monica’s benefit. “I’m _fine_.”

“Sure you are,” Monica deadpans. “Sleeping on my couch and keeping in various states of intoxication for three days running is perfectly fine.” She kicks the end of the couch. The impact jolts through Alex’s head and wins a pained hiss from him. “Get the fuck out or start looking for your crush, I don’t care which one.”

“Fuck,” Alex says, considering the jacket in his hands. His head is aching, his skin is sticky; venturing out into the world sounds exhausting, a task too impossible to face at the moment, but he doesn’t want to even consider the alternative. “Can I at least have a shower first?”

There’s a pause of silence. When Alex looks up Monica has her eyes narrowed and is making a show of glaring skepticism at him from the end of the couch. It makes him laugh in a burst of reaction so startling it leaves him smiling even before she lets her expression ease into a grin.

“I guess so,” she says, making a point about the leniency she is granting as she unfolds her arms and moves around the end of the couch. “But then I want you out of here. I don’t want to see you for a week at _least_.”

“Noted,” Alex says, and gets up to make his bleary way to the bathroom.

The shower helps. The clean of the shampoo feels good over his scalp, the fresh of the soap a relief against the ache of his skin; he runs the water hot, just shy of an actual burn, and stays in longer than he should. It’s not until his head is pounding with the heat and his balance is going shaky again that he finally taps the control panel off and steps out to take a breath of air clear of the humid steam. His clothes need to be changed but there’s no helping that; it’ll have to wait until he’s back in his own apartment.

He’s half-expecting Monica to be waiting for him with his shoes in hand, prepared to follow through on her threat the moment he makes his reappearance. Instead there’s toast waiting for him, the layer of butter on bread simple enough that the low-level nausea in his stomach doesn’t rebel. Monica doesn’t shove him towards the door as he eats, doesn’t actually speak at all; she just produces another pair of slices after the first are gone, and then two for herself, and she is just finishing the first of these when Alex swallows his last bite, and takes a breath, and straightens from his angle over the kitchen counter.

“Alright,” he says, the one word tasting like a declaration of determination. “I’m off.”

“Good riddance,” Monica says, with a soft in her eyes that entirely belies the harsh edge of the words. “Get the hell out of here, loser.”

Alex huffs a laugh. It’s easier to smile than he expected, even with the image of his empty apartment waiting for him to return to it hanging in his thoughts. “Yeah,” he says, and then, after a moment, “Thanks.”

Monica holds his gaze for a long minute. Then she tilts her head, and quirks her lips into a smile, and lifts her last slice of toast in a makeshift salute.

“Of course,” she says, her tone making the words an obvious statement. “Lemme know the next time you need help untangling yourself from some guy too hot for you.”

“I’ll get right on that,” Alex deadpans, and suits actions to words as he makes for the door and for home.


	22. Chapter 22

Things get better, after a while.

The first day back is the worst. Alex’s apartment is cold with lack of human presence, chill with all the time he’s left it empty and unused, but far worse is what he was dreading, what he’s been avoiding by wearing out his welcome at Monica’s. There are traces of Tristan everywhere, in the obvious things like the heap of his guard uniform abandoned in the corner and the less obvious ones like the failed interface attempt that Alex can almost see the other’s fingerprints on. There’s a blanket balled up on the floor, what Tristan made use of as a pillow; it’s only the greatest of self restraint that pushes Alex to drop it into the laundry along with the guard uniform without seeing if there’s not an illusory warmth still clinging to it. He ought to burn the uniform, he knows; it will do him no good at all, even if it fit him better than it does, and it’s far too near of a memory, weighted with more emotional burden than he has any interest in bearing. But he can’t make himself do it, not that first day, so when it comes out of the dryer he folds it into a tight square of cloth and shoves it far back on a shelf, high enough that he has to climb on a chair to reach and well out of sight even to a casual glance. Then he turns on all the lights and sets to work cleaning up, beginning by methodically clearing all data traces of the programming attempt he made that first overlong day with Tristan at his elbow.

So the first day is hard. The second day is better, starting from the moment he wakes up in a bed made familiar again by his own presence and looks around an apartment cleaner than he has ever kept it before, made so by his absolute need to scour all accidental reminders of Tristan from the space. The memories are still there, lingering in his mind to appear at inopportune moments, but they’re his, they span mere days instead of a lifetime, and he’s confident they’ll fade and be forgotten with the distraction of his usual life.

There’s a lot to catch up on. He’s fallen entirely out of communication for over a week; half his contacts are concerned, another half of those have convinced themselves he’s died or, worse, been brought in by the Office, and it takes him days to reestablish to everyone’s satisfaction that he is not only alive but neither brainwashed nor compromised. No one cares to hear about the details of his experience; ‘memory scan error’ is enough to shudder horror down anyone’s spine, and no one asks about the specifics. Alex is fairly sure they’re all assuming the other party was a victim, that his absence was due to the necessities of dealing with the fallout of an accidental dead body, and he doesn’t attempt to correct them.

He starts working again within the week. First off is the project he was working on when he ran into Tristan, an attempted data recovery that has sat for days on his harddrive without any of his usual care in clearing his tracks. Alex spends two full days first clearing all records he had of the security measures in place at the databank and then picking through the regular checks the Office runs on all the machines connected to city power sources to pull the record that he ever had such information from the backups, cleanly so he won’t leave a trail. After that he has another request come through within the hour, a report of a friend of a friend brought in by the Office on charges that are certainly invented but still planted in the server. That takes some time, unfortunately longer than everyone hoped, given that the girl is in custody with the Office for the duration, but in the end Alex manages to tweak the added data into something far less incriminating than it was made out to be, since he can’t clear it entirely without tipping off whoever in the Office set it there in the first place. It’s not a full success, but at least it requires sufficient concentration that Alex thinks of nothing else for the hours it takes him to complete the objective. On his second week back he gets a recommendation for an in-person hack at an Office security center, a tangle of coordination as likely to blow up in his face as to work. He accepts immediately, before he’s had time to think about it and far more quickly than he should; the day of he’s tense with nerves, expecting someone around every corner, irrationally strained with anticipation of something going wrong. But everything works as planned, without mistakes or guards where there should be none, and afterwards Monica and Daniel throw a victory party for him that leaves Alex so drunk he doesn’t make it back onto the couch before he falls asleep. It’s a resounding success, followed by one new project after another, until Alex can feel the rhythm of his life reforming itself around him, knitting over the stutter of crisis until it’s easy to forget it ever happened.

Except.

Except he wakes from dreams, sometimes, hazy things of warm skin and pale hair that he doesn’t let himself remember in full. Except that he almost orders coffee every time he goes to his favorite cafe, and the only thing that stops him is the fear that he would still like the taste even now. Except that just because he can’t see the dark green of the uniform on his shelf doesn’t mean he doesn’t look towards it, doesn’t mean he doesn’t catch himself staring in its direction every time he forgets to restrain the impulse. He keeps thinking of Tristan at odds moments, in the middle of programming a new function into some old project he built or when he’s picking up groceries from the drop-off point in front of his apartment complex. He’ll see blond hair or a green shirt on the street and start to turn before he can stop himself, he’ll hear his name from the middle of a crowd of people and jerk in reaction before he can catch the response back. Sometimes he’ll reach for memories that aren’t there anymore, that aren’t his, will be halfway through a sentence about ‘my sister’ before realizing he can’t remember a face, and will feel a surge of panic before recalling that he doesn’t have a sister, that he’s _never_ had a sister, that his childhood was nothing deserving of the warm glow of affection he feels when he thinks about it.

After a month, he finally gives in.

There’s no excuse for his aggression when he knocks on Monica’s door. He can make no argument for a need for haste, not after a handful of weeks have come and gone without the least action on his side. But he’s been running hot since he kicked back from his computer in a sudden flash of determination, is flushed and breathless with adrenaline he hasn’t let himself indulge in for weeks, and with his heart pounding in his chest the only thing to do is to pound his fist on Monica’s door with equal force.

She answers the door in a towel.

“What the _fuck_ ,” she starts before she’s even seen Alex, her eyes dark with anger and her skin flushed with heat. “If you aren’t goddamn _dying_ you can just turn around and go right the fuck back home before I decide to _murder_ you for interrupting me.”

“I’m sorry,” Alex blurts, guilt hitting hard on the heels of an abrupt reconsideration of how important this really is. “I need your help.”

“ _Obviously_ ,” Monica bites off. Behind her Daniel rounds the corner, still buttoning his jeans and absent a shirt. He offers a wave to Alex, looking similarly flushed but far less furious than Monica does. “What is it _this_ time?”

“I need to find Tristan,” Alex says, rushing past the words before they have time to stick in his throat.

Monica’s expression does not entirely lighten. However, she also does not slam the door in Alex’s face nor continue growling rage at him, so Alex figures he has some edge of sympathy working for him.

“I’ve been trying to forget about him,” he continues, talking to the damped rage in Monica’s expression. “It’s not working.”

“You’re depressed,” Monica suggests, but she sounds a little calmer, a little more gentle.

“No,” Alex says, quick with certainty. “No, I’m fine, I just.” _Need him_ , he wants to say but doesn’t. “Need to find him,” he tries instead, angling the words around filler to take the edge off their meaning.

From the raised eyebrow Monica gives him, this attempt is not wholly successful. “You’re an idiot,” she says, and turns away from the door. But she leaves it open, which is close enough to an invitation that Alex takes it and steps over the entrance so he can push it shut behind him. “Daniel and I are going to take a shower. Your lovestruck self can wait until we’re done to get info on your pretty boy.”

Alex opens his mouth to protest one or both of these appellations as untrue, as unjustified, as unfair. Then he shuts it again.

“Okay,” he says, and moves to sit on the couch. “Thanks.”

Judging from the smirk Monica gives him, this is the correct response.


	23. Chapter 23

Monica retreats to the bedroom as soon as she’s reemerged with her skin damp from her shower and a clean shirt on. Alex can hear the lock click shut behind her, the sound a giveaway for her focused attention on what she’s doing, and then the sound of conversation muffled into unintelligibility by the barrier of the door. Daniel remains in the living room with Alex, both of them eying the bedroom and waiting for the only thing left, which is whatever information Monica can produce from her contacts at one of the Office’s main database centers.

“Do you think she can do it?” Alex asks after five minutes, when Monica’s voice has faded to the silence that comes between the calls she’s making to contacts he’s not allowed to know.

Daniel looks at him and offers the shape of a slow smile that starts in his eyes and only then spreads to his mouth. “Absolutely,” he says, so certain it’s enough to cut past the cynicism in Alex’s blood and ease some of the ache in his chest. Daniel leans back in his chair, kicking his feet out in front of him and letting the armrests take the sprawl of his arms. “Monica can do anything.”

Alex would call him an idiot in love if he didn’t have copious, albeit circumstantial, evidence that this is exactly true, and if he didn’t already want to believe it to be so. He sighs instead, letting the sound speak to his pessimistic concerns instead of words, and tilts his head back to lean it against the support of the couch behind him. There’s another pause of almost-silence, the quiet in the living room spreading to fill the corners of the space; then Monica starts talking in the other room again, and Daniel speaks as if this is his cue.

“Can I ask you something?”

Alex lifts his head to consider the open curiosity in Daniel’s expression. There’s no threat there at all, just wide-eyed interest and a gentle smile that is more comfort than danger.

“Sure,” he says, a little cautious but willing enough to at least hear the question. It’s not as if he’s made a promise to answer, after all.

Daniel’s forehead creases, his brows drawing together on uncertainty. “What do you like about him so much?” Alex blinks, feeling his expression falling into slack surprise at this unexpected tack, and Daniel laughs, backtracking over a few steps of unspoken assumptions. “I like him too.”

“You like everyone,” Alex says, with more truth than heat.

Daniel shrugs. “Yeah,” he admits without any trace of being upset at this. “But you don’t. And he doesn’t seem like the type you would.”

“I don’t like him,” Alex says, the denial too easy to frame for him to stall it before it’s spoken. He’s aware of the absurdity of this statement before he hears it in his ears, doesn’t need Daniel’s raised eyebrows to point out that he’s currently sitting in his best friend’s living room waiting with bated breath for any means of contact for said individual he doesn’t like. “I didn’t,” he amends, but that’s not right either, it’s not _like_ that’s making his chest ache as if with some uncontainable pressure. “Fuck.” He leans forward, taking an imitation of Daniel’s interested lean, and lets his shoulders hunch, lets his head fall forward under its own weight so his hair falls in front of his face.

“It’s not that I like him,” Alex says, staring at the smooth pattern of the expensive floor under his feet, at the cool metal inlaid with a grain and texture like wood so you might think it was were it not for the metal-chill it exudes. He thinks about Tristan asleep next to the couch, the tangle of his hair around his shoulders and the line of pale eyelashes against his cheek, the way his lips parted into unconscious relaxation as he slept.

“It’s that I _miss_ him,” he tries, and that sounds more right, the words feel more true on his tongue. “He was in my head for days, or a part of him was, and I feel like it’s missing now even though I have my own memories back where they should be.”

“That’s part of the danger of memory swapping,” Daniel says slowly, thinking out loud as he works through the same logic Alex has traced and retraced and reretraced, looking for some kind of a loophole from the final, inescapable conclusion he came to. “Are you sure it’s not just aftereffects of the mix-up?”

Alex shuts his eyes, lifts a hand to his head. “Yes,” he says, and fast, before Daniel can ask: “Because it’s not just that.” He takes a breath, lets it out, and with it goes the self-restraint he’s been holding, the wall between his day-to-day existence and the brief, bright span of memories from a month prior. “I miss _him_. Not just the memories, not just _being_ him, it’s.” His throat closes up on the things he can’t say, the word he can’t speak, because behind his closed eyes he’s seeing the edge of a smile forming itself from a frown, he’s seeing the angle of a wrist shifting as fingers reach to point out a line of code on a computer monitor. He can imagine pale hair in his hands, can taste hops on his lips, can hear the sound of his name gasped like a prayer, and he can’t breathe for the burning ache inside his ribcage, for the pressure of the hurt expanding until it’s taking up all the room he needs to breathe. “It’s _everything_.”

“Wow,” Daniel says, sounding a little shaky and startled even though Alex hasn’t really said anything, even though all he’s done is offer a few meaningless phrases that cracked and bled when he tried to give them voice. “You really do--”

“Shut up,” Alex says, fast and loud to cut off the end of Daniel’s sentence. “I know I do.”

The bedroom door opens. Alex shuts his mouth hard, as if Monica could have heard what he was saying through the barrier of the door, and rubs his hand viciously across his face to push himself back into his more usual composure. He feels raw, aching with that heat in his chest and scraped to pain from the stress of pessimism and hope held at once in his head.

“I got it,” Monica announces, not even waiting until she’s come down the hall to declare victory, and Alex’s stomach drops, his heart going into freefall while the rest of him stays frozen on the couch. “Address and contact number, though I can’t confirm he’s answering attempts to reach him.” She’s got her fingers pressed to the back of her head, against the inch of scarred skin under the weight of her hair for her data transfer system; when Alex blinks next his vision flickers with information, the text of an address he only glances at before shoving it away for later retrieval and consideration. “That’s all I can do for you, unless you want me to go and fetch him from his apartment to deliver him to you myself.”

“Right,” Alex says, standing up from the couch in the first jolting wave of adrenaline at this information. “No. Thanks. I’ll do it.”

Monica looks at him for a long moment; he can see her eyes narrowing, her chin coming down. “ _Will_ you?”

Alex takes a breath. His pulse is racing, his skin going chill; he feels a little like he’s going to be sick, like he would have been already if his stomach hadn’t taken a sudden vacation. “I hope so.”

“He will,” Daniel says from the chair, completely steady-certain on the words, and Monica looks to him, her gaze sharpening as she reads whatever information there is to be gained from Daniel’s expression. Alex doesn’t turn around, doesn’t see, but when Monica looks back at him her eyes are softer, her mouth relaxed enough that her expression is nearly a smile.

“Thanks,” Alex says again, looking away and back down at the floor. “I’ll see you later.”

“You’d better bring your boyfriend with you next time,” Monica suggests as he makes for the door.

Alex’s throat catches, on a sob or a laugh he’s not sure which and isn’t sure he could tell the difference right now; it’s certainly hysteria in his veins, he’s sure of that much, adrenaline running too hot to give him a chance to catch his breath.

“I’ll try,” he says, and lets himself back out.


	24. Chapter 24

It’s another week before Alex gets the nerve to go to the address.

He thinks about calling, thinks about it more than once. He spends three nights in a row sitting awake at the edge of his bed with the information Monica gave him scrolling across his vision and the temptation of the contact number blinking at him. All he needs to do is select it and he could hear Tristan’s voice within minutes, could offer some kind of indication of the amount of time he’s spent thinking of the other over the last several weeks. But Tristan might not pick up, and worse he might not be glad to hear from Alex, and Alex doesn’t have an explanation for why he’s waited, for why he’s calling now, for what invisible force has finally pushed him over the edge to action. So he stares at the number, and he memorizes the address until he doesn’t even have to access his data storage to know it, and he doesn’t call.

And then, finally, he goes.

He doesn’t know what spurs him to finally act this time any more than he could say what it was that brought him rushing to Monica’s door with no warning. Maybe it’s the sleep he finally gets, several hours in a row that he clings to through the early morning of a Thursday. Maybe it’s that his dreams leave him warm and brighter than he usually feels, that he wakes with a smile even if he can’t recall the specifics of his unconscious thoughts. Or maybe it’s just that it’s finally been long enough, that holding onto his multiple options has finally lost its appeal, and come that morning he’s ready to face the possibility of defeat if only for the relief of resolution.

He holds steady in his decision while he gets dressed, while he pulls a brush through his hair, while he tracks down a jacket and tugs on his shoes. The walk down to the main street doesn’t deter him, nor do the several blocks of distance he crosses on foot for how unwilling he is to share the information in his head with a mechanical taxi, as if offering it up would steal it from his own memory or might somehow make what he’s doing unbearably more real. So he walks, and he’s calm, breathing in lungfuls of air that take the flush of adrenaline off his skin and cool him to rationality, and he thinks he’s fine until he sees the address he’s looking for hovering in the display of a tall apartment complex.

He doesn’t stop. He’s sure that if he stops he won’t start again, that his feet will lock him in place or worse stage a full-blown retreat, so he doesn’t stop. He moves instead, walking up to the front door (there’s an electronic lock, but it’s old enough that he might as well have the key in hand for how well it keeps him out) and climbs the stairs, keeping to the outside of the building instead of the warmer interior corridors and elevators. His heart is pounding, his pulse racing; it’s easy to blame that on the climb even when he knows that’s not the reason, even when he feels lightheaded and dizzy after only a few flights of stairs. Everything is clean, painfully so; it reminds Alex of a hotel, or short-term lodging, as if the people who live here aren’t really living here or aren’t entirely human, to exist in such a narrowly-defined space. He thinks about that instead of what he’s doing, focuses his attention on the few signs of habitation he can see set along the edge of skylights or high, privacy-glazed windows, and then he’s in front of a generic apartment with nothing at all on the windowsill, and there’s no avoiding it anymore.

Alex reaches for the doorbell first. It’s an impulse, his usual approach for Monica’s apartment or on the rare occasions he’s visiting other clusters of friends in person; but his hand hesitates over the button, a vague echo of a memory suggesting that he knock instead. He doesn’t remember why -- a broken bell? a preference for the fainter sound of a knock? a restless dog? -- but he obeys the impulse anyway, setting his knuckles carefully against the door to gauge its distance before he draws his hand back and lets the swing of motion carry his fist back forward in a clean rattle of sound. He gives three knocks, a makeshift pattern forming under his knuckles, and then he waits, shoving his hands into his pockets and hunching his shoulders more against the rapidly approaching future than against the chill wind slicing along the front of the building.

There’s no warning sound from inside. Alex is listening for it, is toying with the idea of bolting as soon as he hears footsteps, but it’s so silent he’s sure the apartment is deserted, that Monica’s information was wrong or that Tristan is out for the day. Alex can find an infinity of reasons why he should leave, why this was a bad idea, why he doesn’t need to be here. He’s still thinking about them, still staring at the door and talking himself into leaving, when it comes open, and Tristan is there.

He looks different, is the first stupid thought Alex’s brain offers. He’s barefoot, dressed casually in jeans and a t-shirt that fit far better on him than Alex’s ever did, the shirt a soft grey too understated for Alex’s tastes that makes Tristan’s eyes look bluer by comparison. His shoulders are relaxed, angled into the comfort of home in spite of the interruption Alex offers, and his hand at his side is easy, too, his fingers falling to comfort against his thigh instead of strained into a fist. Alex looks back up, takes in Tristan’s hair -- it’s in a braid, he realizes, that’s what’s so different, the yellow weight of it is pulled back into one heavy plait -- but then he’s looking back at his eyes, at the grey-blue of them going wide on breathless shock, and he can’t avoid speaking anymore.

“Hey,” he says, his voice betraying him into a wobble of sound, into the threat of a choke at the back of his tongue. “Remember me?”

Alex can hear the breath Tristan takes, can hear the sudden sharp inhale of air like he’s forgotten how to breathe for a moment. Alex can sympathize; he feels like the oxygen in the air has evaporated, or like his lungs won’t work, or like he’s still holding to the lungful of air he had when Tristan opened the door.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Tristan says, and what Alex thought was relaxation in his shoulders sags out of tension, the other’s posture going so heavy with relief Alex thinks Tristan may be in danger of total collapse right where he stands. But he’s smiling, his mouth curving onto happiness even as his eyes go dark with emotion, and Alex doesn’t need more invitation than that smile to step forward and into the warmth of Tristan’s life.


	25. Chapter 25

“I’m sorry I don’t have any tea,” Tristan says from the other side of the kitchen countertop. “I tried drinking some after but I still didn’t like it.”

“It’s fine,” Alex says, looking at the table so he doesn’t see the way Tristan is staring at him instead of at the coffee he is supposed to be making. He can feel the intensity of the other’s gaze as it is, can feel the single-minded focus drawing in around him as if he might evaporate if Tristan doesn’t keep an eye on him. Alex understands the impulse. It’s hard for him to trust in his own existence in this moment, with the paraphernalia of Tristan’s existence around him and the utter normalcy of the other’s life arranged neatly on shelves; Alex feels like an intruder, like an invader, like he’s waging war on Tristan’s life just by being here.

“Here you go,” Tristan offers from his elbow, and Alex jumps, startled to see the cup Tristan is holding out for him. “Sorry,” he says, offering immediate apology for his silent approach, and Alex wants to snap at him for being so quick to accept blame but he can’t find words, can’t trust himself to speak. He takes the cup of coffee instead.

“I have milk and sugar too,” Tristan says, padding around the edge of the table and sitting at the other side. It’s the worst of his possible positions; from across the table Alex can’t avoid his gaze any more than he can touch Tristan’s skin. “If you’d like it more with those.”

“No,” Alex says, and takes a too-large mouthful of too-hot liquid. It burns his tongue, drags over his tastebuds with the bite of the bitter coffee, and he lets it wash over him without protest, lets his whole body shudder with reflexive reaction to the heat and the taste. “This is fine.”

Tristan clears his throat. Alex glances up at him -- it’s impossible not to, with the obvious attempt to draw his attention -- but Tristan only looks at him for a moment, barely long enough for Alex to see the soft at the corners of his eyes before he looks away and down at the utterly uninteresting surface of the table.

“I really have been looking for you,” he says, and that apology is back in his voice, like he’s sorry he wasn’t the one to appear unannounced on Alex’s doorstep. “I couldn’t find anything on you, no matter how I tried to get at it.”

“Good,” Alex says, a little more harshly than he intends. “You _shouldn’t_ be able to, I’ve put some effort into covering my tracks.”

Tristan laughs, only the strain in the sound giving away his nerves. “You’re perfectly safe from _me_ trying to find you,” he says, twisting the cup in his hands and hunching his shoulders in over the tabletop. “I can get to some really top-level documentation but it doesn’t say anything at all, just that you’re a citizen of the city.” He laughs again, too-fast and too-high, his fingers tensing and bracing hard against the sides of his cup. “They only had one picture associated with you, this awful grainy thing like it came from a security camera. It didn’t even look like you.” He takes a breath, frowning at the way his hands are starting to tremble. Alex can see his shoulders straining with the effort to steady them. “That must take some work, to clear your records so thoroughly. I checked mine and the Office has all kinds of things on me.” A shrug, one tense shoulder dragging up into an anxious hunch. “If they wanted to find a reason to arrest me there’s plenty I did myself, they wouldn’t even have to--”

“God,” Alex says, “shut _up_ ” and he’s reaching across the table, abandoning his cup of too-bitter coffee to close his fingers around the tension straining in Tristan’s arm. Tristan jumps at the contact, all his rigid self-control jolting out of alignment, and his hand draws away from his cup, his shoulders turn to open towards Alex as he lifts his head with the bright of hope back in his eyes.

“Oh god,” he says, the words as breathless as they are meaningless, and then Alex gets a hand into Tristan’s hair and his mouth on his and he’s kissing him, hard, desperate even over the width of the table between them. He’s leaning in too far, putting the balance of his half-full cup at risk, but Tristan is coming to meet him, pushing his own cup away so he can get a hand braced on the tabletop and lean in closer. He tastes like sugar, like the sweet of his own coffee still clinging to his lips, and Alex sighs against the taste, licks hard over Tristan’s mouth for it until the other catches up enough to part his lips and let Alex taste it off his tongue too. Tristan’s making some kind of sound, soft enough to be unintelligible and hot enough that Alex doesn’t need coherency, and his fingers are fitting against the back of Alex’s neck, bracing against the shape of the control module set under the other’s skin behind the curve of his ear. The friction purrs down Alex’s spine, his thoughts lighting up as if Tristan could activate the module with his unrecognized fingerprints, and he moves without thinking about it, shoving to his feet without letting go of his fumbling hold on the tie on Tristan’s hair. His chair skids backwards and topples over, but neither of them pause for it; Alex is too busy maneuvering around the edge of the table, Tristan too occupied in denying him enough slack to manage it, and then Alex is clear of the corner and Tristan is stumbling upright too, his motion so clumsy with desperation that he trips over the table leg and starts to fall before Alex catches him. It’s less of a catch, really, than a slowed collapse to the floor, but then Tristan’s knee is against Alex’s hip and Tristan is arching in closer to him and this is good, this is _fine_ , obviously they don’t to be upright for this anyway.

“I missed you,” Tristan blurts as soon as Alex lets him have his mouth back for the few moments he needs to drag the hairtie finally loose and urge his fingers up under the soft of the other’s t-shirt. Tristan’s arm is looped around Alex’s shoulders, straining with tension like he’s afraid to let him go, and his other hand is still tangling into Alex’s hair and pressing deeper into the locks with every movement he takes. “That’s crazy, but.”

“It’s not,” Alex says, pressing his mouth to Tristan’s throat, dragging his teeth over the skin. “It’s not that crazy.”

“I didn’t think I was ever going to see you again,” Tristan continues, and Alex comes up onto his knees and gains the advantage of height so he can urge Tristan backwards over the cool of the hopefully-clean floor. Tristan’s foot slips, his knees angle wide, and Alex lets his weight drop forward and down to fit himself into the space between them. Tristan groans at the pressure, arching up off the floor in a rush of heat, and Alex grabs at his hip to brace him still as he finds his balance enough to roll his hips forward and grind against the front of Tristan’s jeans. Tristan’s head goes back, his cheeks flushing, and this Alex remembers all on his own, this curve of spine and these parted lips and this breathless, anxious want heavy in the air between them.

“You did,” Alex says, a simple summary of a complicated story, an easy way to shortcut all the explanation that he’s not completely master of himself and all the things he can’t bear to say aloud just yet. “You’re a lot easier to find than I am.”

Tristan’s smile is like the dawn, breaking over his face to turn his eyes soft and his mouth warm. “I’m glad,” he says, and Alex rocks against him again, watches the happiness bright in his eyes turn to incoherent heat as Tristan’s fingers seize into a fist on Alex’s hair. They should move, he knows; this is no better than the rooftop, really, for all that the delay in getting their clothes off seems like an impossible wait, now. There’s a couch in sight, probably a bedroom down the hall; and still Alex can’t get himself to let go of Tristan’s hip or Tristan’s hair falling out of its plait, can’t seem to do anything at all but pin the other to the floor with the weight of his body and grind against him with as much force as he can find from this position. Tristan arches up into the friction, his inhale catching hard at the back of his throat, and Alex pushes in closer, presses his mouth against Tristan’s shoulder and breathes in hard as they fit themselves together along the whole length of their bodies.

“Alexei,” Tristan says, the syllables melting in his throat until Alex doesn’t even want to protest this use of his full name. “We should.”

“We should stay here,” Alex suggests, growling the sound into Tristan’s skin as he rocks against him again. Tristan shivers, his hand tensing at Alex’s waist, but in spite of how hard he’s pulling at the other’s body he’s still talking, still somehow locating words from the heat Alex can feel radiant against him.

“No,” he says, hooking his leg around Alex’s hip in complete disregard of his own words. Alex pushes in closer, fitting himself as close against Tristan’s jeans as he can get; the weight of the denim seam has never seemed so intolerable. “The bedroom, it’s right down the hall.”

Alex huffs a laugh. “You don’t want to come on your kitchen floor?”

“I’d like to get my jeans off first,” Tristan admits. It makes Alex laugh and lights his blood flame-hot at once with the idea that he could have Tristan gasping and coming under him without ever getting his clothes off, but then he thinks of bare legs, of flushed skin, and the draw of that is enough to pull him back and away from Tristan’s skin by inches.

“Okay,” he says, managing to make it to something that sounds barely tolerant, as if he’s giving something up by letting Tristan steer them back towards the bedroom. “If you want to be vanilla about it, fine.”

Tristan doesn’t even spare the breath to protest this. He pushes up off the floor, his body curving like the motion is effortless, and leans in to catch a kiss off Alex’s mouth, a quick press of lips that feels more like a promise than a farewell. Then he’s scrambling to his feet, faster about the movement than Alex is, and leading the way down the hallway to one of the two doors at the end of the short path. He pushes one of the doors open, steps inside as the automatic illumination rises into gentle gold, and Alex is more than a little curious about Tristan’s bedroom and Tristan’s life but right now the other is tugging his grey shirt up and off his head, and the flex of his shoulders and shift of his back is enough distraction to more than override the draw of their surroundings. Alex makes a sound in the back of his throat, something that is not entirely a moan and not quite a purr, and steps in close while Tristan is reaching for the front of his pants to unfasten the button.

“Keep going,” he says against the back of Tristan’s neck when the other appears in some danger of stalling himself to stillness as he tilts his head to the side to allow space for Alex’s mouth against his skin. “You look better with less on.”

“You sure know how to give a compliment,” Tristan deadpans, but Alex gets his hands on the other’s hips and drags Tristan back against him, and whatever protest Tristan might have offered dissolves into a shudder Alex can feel running all through the other’s body. His hand comes up, reaching for Alex’s hair like he’s trying to hold him in place, and Alex lets his grip go so he can reach around and unfasten Tristan’s jeans for him. The denim is heavy, hard to manage with how weirdly shaky his hands are, but he pushes hard on the button and drags at the zipper, and then he’s urging the cloth off Tristan’s hips and down his thighs and he can feel the way the other is shaking under his touch.

“I kept thinking about you,” Tristan admits as Alex slides free of the fingers fisted in his hair and drops down to a knee so he can push the other’s jeans off his legs entirely. “I dreamt about you every night that first week before I started trying to find you.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Alex tells him, pressing a kiss bruise-hard at Tristan’s hip instead of admitting to his own half-forgotten dreams of pale hair and moonlit skin. “Romance isn’t enough to make up for being a complete amateur.”

“It seemed easy when I was with you,” Tristan says, stepping free of his jeans and leaving Alex with a lot more to look at than he knows what to do with. He gets to his feet, trailing his fingers over warm skin as he goes, and listens to the way Tristan shudders even before Alex gets his hands on his shoulders to shove him towards the neatly-made bed. “I thought I could figure it out.”

“It was easy because you had parts of _me_ in your head,” Alex tells him. When he pushes Tristan moves without resistance, toppling forward over the bed and turning at the same time to look back and up and Alex standing over him. “It’s not something you can just pick up one afternoon.”

“Yeah,” Tristan agrees, a little sheepish but mostly just flushed. His fingers find out the hem of Alex’s shirt and curl into a fist to pull the other down closer. “You should take your clothes off.”

Alex’s eyebrows jump up, his mouth catching hard on the threat of a smile. “Just like that?” he asks, bracing a knee against the bed so he can lean in over Tristan, can watch the way the other’s gaze drifts to track the movement of his mouth. “Don’t you have any patience?”

“That’s not fair,” Tristan protests, getting his other hand up under Alex’s shirt to start pushing it up and off by his own action. “You have me practically naked and you still have your shoes on.”

Alex pauses, gives lingering consideration to the dip between Tristan’s collarbones, to the shift of his shoulder as he urges Alex’s shirt higher off his skin. He’s sprawled over the bed, taking up most of the width of it before he starts to sit up to strain for Alex’s mouth, to achieve a drag of too-brief friction before Alex pushes him back to the bed and pulls away to get to his feet.

“You’re right,” he admits, and moves fast, before he can see Tristan’s expression at this capitulation. He catches the edge of his shirt, twists it up off and over his head as he toes off one shoe; he’s still shaking the hair back from his face when he reaches for the front of his jeans to unfasten the buttons holding them on. By the time he looks back up Tristan’s eyes have gone wide, his lips have parted on heat; he’s stalled out, braced on one hand on the bed while the other hovers in mid-air, a stretch for contact forgotten in the speed of Alex’s motion.

“Better?” Alex asks as he lets his jeans fall and kicks them off along with his second shoe. He’s not particularly shy about his body -- it’s not something he’s either proud or ashamed of -- but the way Tristan is staring at him has his blood rushing hotter under his skin, has him shivering through a thrum of electricity as if Tristan’s gaze is charged with it.

“Yes,” Tristan says, but he sounds distracted, and when he reaches out it’s to fit his hand against Alex’s waist instead of something more suggestive. His thumb catches on skin, dragging over a strange texture, and Alex shivers with the sensation. “What is this from?”

Alex looks down. There’s an array of dark lines under Tristan’s touch, a geometry of scars that spans from his hip to the bottom edge of his ribcage, a brand so long forgotten that he doesn’t even remember the pain of the contact.

“Security system,” Alex says shortly, and then leans in to push Tristan back flat over the bed before he can voice the sympathy that rises immediately in his eyes. “From when I was young and stupid.”

Tristan smiles like he was supposed to. His eyes are very soft, his skin is very warm. “As opposed to now?”

“As opposed to now,” Alex agrees, growling the words out of the question Tristan made of them. “Do you want to talk about my scars or do you want me to fuck you?”

Tristan’s eyelashes flutter, his eyes go dark. “ _Oh_ ,” he says, and his spine arches an answer, his cock going hotter where he’s pressed against Alex’s hip. “The second.”

“That’s what I thought.” Alex rocks his weight down, pressing Tristan hard against the mattress, and Tristan’s exhale comes out as a groan, dragging hard over his vocal chords as his hand finds Alex’s hair again. “Do you have lube?”

“Right,” Tristan says, canting his head to the side in a motion that is probably him looking towards the bedside table and just ends up drawing Alex’s attention to the curve of his throat. “Yes, let me just--” He slides away just as Alex’s mouth touches his skin, the glancing friction too quick to offer satisfaction, and Alex trails him as Tristan twists sideways to reach for the drawer. His fingers fit at Tristan’s hips, his mouth finds out the tension along his shoulder, and Tristan fumbles his hold on the bottle he’s trying to retrieve, has to make a second attempt at it before he succeeds.

“Here,” he says, triumphant and a little breathless. “I can do it, if you--”

“No,” Alex cuts him off, faster than he intended, and lets Tristan’s hip go so he can take the bottle instead. “I want to.” He pushes at the other’s shoulder, an effort to urge him back to the bed unnecessary since Tristan’s already falling back anyway, already reaching towards the elastic waistband of his underwear before he visibly stalls into uncertainty.

Alex doesn’t. He reaches out without setting the bottle down, pinning it against his palm so he can hook his index finger under Tristan’s clothes and peel them down and off. Tristan arches off the bed as soon as he realizes what’s happening, his legs flexing with the effort to assist with the angle of his body, and Alex drags his clothes off and aside to be forgotten in the first rush of distraction offered by Tristan stripped down to nothing but skin under him. He’s hard against his stomach, his cock flushed dark against the pale of his hips, and he startles an inhale when Alex touches the inside of his thigh, shivering with the adrenaline even as he angles his knee wide to make his legs an invitation for more.

“Stay there,” Alex tells him, barely glancing up to see the color creeping over Tristan’s cheeks before he looks back down, to his hands this time as he twists the lid of the bottle open and spills liquid over his fingers. Tristan stays where he is, only the faint tremble in his legs to speak to his nerves at remaining so positioned, and Alex leans forward to fit between his knees as soon as his fingers are slick, rewarding Tristan with the friction of his hand bracing at the other’s hip. Tristan’s quivering under his touch as he reaches out to brace his fingers at Alex’s wrist, and Alex takes an unexpectedly sharp inhale at the featherlight brush of the touch across his skin, at the drag of fingerprints along the angle of his arm.

“Here,” he says, and it’s part a warning and part an offer, and Tristan shifts his knee wider and lets Alex fit his hand down between them. His skin is hot to the touch, radiant over Alex’s fingers as he slides against the other’s entrance to press the slick of the lube over his skin.

Tristan’s fingers tighten on his wrist. “Alexei,” he says, “I’m ready” like he’s anticipating Alex’s question, except that Alex isn’t asking it; he’s moving instead, curling his finger in and pushing at once, so Tristan’s voice dies into a quivering groan instead of the coherency he was reaching for. His eyelashes dip and flutter over the grey of his eyes, and Alex takes a sharp inhale, tries to remember how to coordinate his breathing with Tristan hot around him.

“Is this okay?” he asks, needlessly because he can see it is in the way Tristan’s shoulders are pushing back against the bed, in the way the other’s spine is arching into an involuntary curve at the press of his finger. Alex tightens his hold on Tristan’s hip, bracing him in place as if Tristan is trying to get away at all, as if all Tristan’s movements aren’t an attempt to bring himself in closer. “Tristan?”

“Yes,” Tristan says, his voice coming breathless on heat. His hand finds out the soft of the blanket under them and makes a fist on the fabric. “Keep going.”

Alex does. Tristan is quiet, after that; he just shuts his eyes, and clings to the sheets, and colors into a high flush all across his cheekbones as Alex eases him open with one finger and then with two, angling his touch in deeper as Tristan relaxes around him. Alex can’t even look at what he’s doing; he’s too caught by the way Tristan’s shoulders flex under the drag of his hand on the sheets, by the curve of his throat when he tips his head back, by the pale of his undone hair looking like gold against the dark of the blankets. Alex’s heart is pounding in his chest, his breathing going deeper and slower as if to compensate, until he’s almost forgotten that this is preparation and not the end goal, until he’s nearly ready to continue until he can feel Tristan coming around his fingers.

Then Tristan shifts his leg, angles his knee wider by an inch, and Alex lets his composure go.

“Give me one minute,” he says, as if Tristan needs to be told to give him anything right now, as if Alex can’t read the other’s capitulation right off the color staining his cheeks and the thoughtless part of his lips. Alex slides his fingers free, slow so he can hear the way Tristan’s breathing trembles on the friction, and then strips off his own boxers fast so he’s leaning in over the other as Tristan’s eyes come open and he starts to lift his head to look for him. Tristan’s reaching hand ends up at Alex’s shoulder instead of in empty air, his fingers catching to hold Alex’s hair at the back of his neck, and Alex leans in to kiss him, to catch the soft of Tristan’s parted lips against his own while he settles himself against the bed and between Tristan’s knees.

“Like this?” he asks when he pulls away by a half-inch to catch an inhale, still so close he can feel Tristan’s breathing against his skin. He has one hand braced over Tristan’s shoulder, the effort a faint strain against his arm; the other he slides up the underside of Tristan’s thigh, hooking his fingers under the other’s knee so he can push up and into a suggestion, into an offer.

Alex can feel the way Tristan shudders against him. “Yes,” he says, and his arm comes around Alex’s shoulders to hold him where he is, his other foot bracing against the bed. “Just like this.”

“Good,” Alex tells him, and pushes forward into him.

It’s a slow motion; Tristan is stretched and slick but Alex doesn’t want to rush this first drag of friction, of heat, of sensation unfolding up the whole length of his spine as he slides deeper. Tristan lets a held breath go, gasping into relaxation as Alex thrusts deeper, and his cheeks are crimson now, all of his skin flushing darker under the heat of the movement. He’s the one who speaks first, who manages “Alexei” in a faint, breathless tone, and it’s Alex who kisses him for it, catching the last syllable onto his tongue as he comes all the way forward to fit his hips flush with Tristan’s.

“Yeah,” he says when he pulls away, when he starts to draw back for another slow thrust. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” Tristan’s eyes are hazy, his lips damp like they’re expecting another kiss; his heat-slurred gaze drifts over Alex’s features, catching at his hair, at his eyes, at his mouth before veering sideways to the shine of his earrings. “I’m great.”

“Fuck,” Alex says, and rolls his hips forward, watches Tristan’s face go slack in the rush of sensation. “This is.”

“I wanted this,” Tristan says suddenly, like it’s a confession, like the walls of self-restraint are melting in the heat between them. When Alex shifts his weight lower he can feel Tristan hard against his stomach, can feel the head of his cock going slick with pre-come. “Last time. When we were on the roof.”

Alex laughs, the sound turning itself over into purring smoke on the heat spreading out into all his blood. “You wanted me to fuck you?” he asks, tightening his hold on Tristan’s knee and thrusting hard into him to punctuate. “Like this?”

“Yes,” Tristan says, and he’s letting the sheets go, fitting his hand down between the overheated press of skin-to-skin to close his fingers around himself. Alex can feel the first stroke he takes, can feel the friction of fingers catching against his stomach in the moment before Tristan tenses and shudders with the relief of it. “I’ve been thinking about it for weeks.”

“Jesus,” Alex says, all his body going hot with the idea, and he takes another rocking thrust forward, meeting and matching Tristan’s rhythm as he strokes over himself. They both exhale at once, Tristan’s a whimper and Alex’s a groan, and Alex moves again, pushing Tristan’s leg up higher until it’s flush with his chest. “You’re a mess.”

“I know,” Tristan admits without hesitation. He lets his arm around Alex’s shoulders go, reaches up to brace himself against the headboard with one hand; Alex takes the invitation this appears to be to fuck harder into the heat of Tristan’s body, and the rhythm of Tristan’s stroking stalls into a shudder of tension Alex can see run though his arm and the bracing angle of his shoulder. “But you’re here.”

Alex isn’t sure if this is intended as justification or as a commentary on his own less than perfect composure. He doesn’t spend much time thinking about it. Better to rock himself forward again, to press their bodies as close as he can get them, to lean in close and stop the adrenaline-rushed flow of Tristan’s words with his lips. Tristan whines at the contact, whimpers the harder at the next thrust Alex takes, and Alex starts to lose himself then, his awareness of his surroundings melting into haze as he falls into a rhythm with the arch of Tristan’s spine and the speeding movement of his hand over himself. He shifts his bracing arm, dropping to his elbow so he can get closer, and Tristan is going hotter under him, his skin turning radiant as if he’s holding sunlight in his veins instead of blood. His hand jerks faster, stuttering out-of-pattern with desperation, and Alex’s shoulders go tense with anticipation for the heartbeat before Tristan arches, and gasps, and comes between them. The strain in his body evaporates, he collapses boneless back to the bed, and Alex stops thinking entirely in the haze of heat that takes over Tristan’s expression. His mouth fits to Tristan’s shoulder, his breathing rushes hot over the other’s skin, and it’s only a few more thrusts before Tristan’s breathless “Alexei?” is enough to shatter the building tension in Alex’s body and push him over the edge into a full-body shudder of pleasure. He’s hot, he’s shaking, everything has gone soft and warm and so hazy that he doesn’t realize that his eyes are shut or that his face is pressed hard against Tristan’s shoulder for the first few moments. There’s just white behind his eyelids, painless electricity in his veins, and the heat shuddering over his skin and radiating from Tristan under him to melt everything into languid unconcern.

Tristan’s breathing slow when Alex collects himself enough to pull away, to ease himself back into his own skin instead of halfway to Tristan’s. His eyes are shut, his bracing arm now relaxed into an angle over his head; he looks calm, satisfied, his mouth curving on a smile softer than Alex has ever seen it, the tell for past-tense strain only evident in the contrast. It makes Alex’s chest ache, swells pressure against his ribcage, and he leans back in instead of moving away as he intended, taking his weight on a shaky arm so he can fit his mouth to the very corner of Tristan’s lips.

Tristan’s laugh is as warm as the rest of him.


	26. Chapter 26

Tristan’s computer is a mess.

Alex kicks himself into a seat in front of it while Tristan’s in the shower, lets the sweat clinging to his skin dry without bothering with putting on more than the jeans he abandoned over the side of Tristan’s bed. It’s just boredom, at first, that sets his palms over the control panel to bring up the play of pale blue color over his vision while the shower runs in the other room; then there’s interest, than amusement, Alex tracing the history of Tristan’s attempts to find him like electronic lines laid into the other’s palms. He tried legal methods, first, registries and too-long lists of results for the “firstname=alexei” filter, pages and pages of names that must have taken days to comb through. Alex knows he’s not recognizably on those but there’s something oddly endearing about the idea of Tristan staring down the impossible list of city residents that share his first name and pushing on with his efforts -- as clearly he did -- in spite of the absolute absurdity of the attempt. There are records of phone calls, text messages, efforts to retrieve images of the Alexeis in question; he was thorough, Alex will give him that, careful to entirely exhaust this option before moving on to the next. The next were criminal records, and he did find something here, Alex can see the traces of it in the history of the computer. The incident is years old, Alex knows, though he doesn’t care to spend overlong recalling this particular event in his life, and even then there’s just one grainy picture, enough to draw out the dark of his hair and the set of his much-younger jaw but not much else. Even his earrings are absent, stripped at the metal scanners when he was brought into the Security Office; Alex touches the cool of them now, indulging in an idle habit made weighty by the recollection of their temporary loss.

The picture was valuable, evidentially. Tristan saved it to his desktop and opened it several dozen times; Alex considers the timestamps on the access points, the row of ten within five minutes when Tristan was apparently trying to stop, the span of the file being open for nearly an hour late enough at night that Alex has no doubt of the intended use. It makes him smile, unsure whether he’s more amused or touched, and it’s then that the shower shuts off. Alex waits until Tristan is in the hallway, until he can hear the sound of his footsteps padding across the floor, and then, without looking up: “You made a mess of this, you know.”

“What?” Tristan asks as he rounds the corner to the main part of the apartment. “Made a mess of...oh.” Alex looks up at him still grinning; Tristan is dressed again, wearing jeans and a clean shirt across his shoulders to collect damp from his half-dried hair. He looks comfortable, looks like he belongs here; it makes Alex’s chest hurt again, like his heart is trying to pull itself free of his ribcage. “Yeah, I did.”

“You made good use of this,” Alex says, drawing the image up on the monitor for Tristan’s benefit. “How many times did you jerk off to my mug shot?”

“Shut up,” Tristan blurts, and Alex’s smile drags into a grin as Tristan’s cheeks go crimson on embarrassment. He ducks his head to hide some of the stain across his cheeks behind the weight of his hair. “I told you I thought about you a lot.”

“Yeah?” Alex kicks away from the computer panel, leaving the image up just for the way it’s making Tristan flush darker with every inhale. Tristan looks up when he gets to his feet, his gaze following Alex’s motion as he steps in closer to the other. “You didn’t specify how, exactly.”

“What did you _think_ I meant?” Tristan asks, sounding frustrated but looking warmer the closer Alex comes. “You blew me on a _roof_ and then threw me out the next morning without saying goodbye, what was I supposed to think about?”

“Not me,” Alex says, offering an admission that drags rough in his throat as his chest constricts. “You were supposed to leave me the fuck alone.”

Tristan’s chin comes up, his eyes go dark. Alex can see the frustration turning to fire, can see his teasing striking enough of a spark to earn him a snap in response. “You wouldn’t have known,” Tristan points out with absolute, painful accuracy. “I would never have found you on my own, you said so yourself.”

“You wouldn’t have,” Alex says, absolutely certain in the weight of the statement. “I can stay off the radar of Security, I can definitely stay away from some kid who thinks he’s a hacker after borrowing my memories for a few days.”

“You could have left me alone,” Tristan points out. Alex reaches for his hair, pushes a lock of it back and off Tristan’s shoulder; Tristan lets him, even tips his head in capitulation to the motion while his eyes are still dark. “You’re the one who came to find me.”

“Yeah,” Alex says to Tristan’s hair instead of to his eyes, holding his focus on the less-than-interesting motion of his fingers because it’s safer than meeting the cut of silver in the other’s stare. “I did.”

“Well then,” Tristan says. His eyelashes shift, his breathing sticks in his throat. “Why does my lack of ability with hacking matter at all?”

“I’m just saying don’t quit your day job,” Alex suggests, drawn in by the line of Tristan’s throat, by the soap-fresh clean of his skin.

He can feel Tristan’s laugh better than he can hear it; it’s too soft to be quite audible, more a startled tremor through his shoulders than anything else. “Yeah, well.” He clears his throat, coughs awkwardness out of his voice. “Might be a little late for that.”

Alex pulls back to consider the way Tristan isn’t looking at him, the way the other is staring off over his shoulder like there’s something fascinating on the blank wall behind him. “You quit your _job_?”

“Got fired,” Tristan says, as careful on the words as if precision is important. “They were more angry about me abandoning my post halfway through my shift than about me being absent.” He looks back over and meets Alex’s gaze as his mouth drags into a sheepish smile. “I got a hell of a lecture about responsibility before they let me go.”

“Shocking,” Alex drawls. “I never would have guessed security work would require responsibility.” He hesitates for a moment; then: “So what _are_ you doing?”

“Nothing right now,” Tristan admits. “I’ll start looking for work now that I’m not looking for you.”

“Hm.” Alex touches his fingers to Tristan’s neck, drags gently against the curve of it. When he clears his throat the sound is rough at the back of his tongue, honesty demanding expression in spite of the bitter taste of the words. “You know you’re not going to get along well with the Office if you’re with me.”

He can feel Tristan tense with understanding. “I know,” is all he says, simple like he’s not declaring himself on the wrong side of the system that purports to rule every aspect of their life.

Alex looks back up to meet Tristan’s eyes. He’s expecting the other to be looking away, at the wall or down at the floor, avoiding Alex’s gaze with the intensity of discomfort, but when he lifts his gaze Tristan is staring right at him, his eyes steady and dark and his mouth set without a trace of tremor to it. It turns Alex’s question into a statement, the answer given clear by Tristan’s expression before he speaks. “You’ve thought about this.”

Tristan’s face doesn’t shift. “I have.”

Alex is the one who shuts his eyes, who lets the weight of that statement settle in against his shoulders and lay itself along the length of his spine like a new modification carried on Tristan’s lips instead of on metal and code. Then he lets his inhale go, and opens his eyes, and meets Tristan’s gaze with as little flinching as the other gave him.

“Good,” he says, capitulation so immediate he can see surprise flicker across Tristan’s expression, like he was expecting far more of a fight. “I kinda got used to programming by dictation.”

Tristan’s laugh is startled and hot against his mouth.


	27. Chapter 27

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Alex explains as he takes the lead up the last flight of stairs to his apartment. “You’ve got decent equipment but the files are filled with security bugs from the Office. I spent half my time just stripping those out, I couldn’t get any work done.”

“I didn’t even know to be careful until a month ago,” Tristan protests, not without reason. “Wouldn’t we need to clear the data out anyway?”

“Don’t be reasonable,” Alex tells him. He fits the electronic key into the lock, reaches out to press his thumb against the half-covered print scanner; it’s not as secure as he would like, but it’s hard enough to see the plate laid into the door near the hinge that it’ll do. The lock clicks open, the door loosening from its solid resistance so he can push it forward. “We don’t have to start with that at least. It’s a pain to work at your place anyway.”

“I would have expected you to be better at concentrating,” Tristan points out as Alex leads the way into the apartment, waving a hand to bring the lighting up to reasonable levels instead of the dim illumination he usually keeps it at.

“I _am_ better when I’m at home,” Alex says as he kicks his shoes off in the doorway and nudges them to the side to make space for Tristan behind him. “It’s harder in your apartment. It’s too clean.”

“Too _clean_?”

“Yeah.” Alex sheds his jacket, shaking his hair back from his face as he tosses the coat over the back of a chair. “It feels inhuman, like you don’t really live there.”

“I do,” Tristan says, and Alex turns to see him still standing on the other side of the doorway, hesitant as if he’s uncertain of his welcome. “I’m just a neat person.”

“A boring person,” Alex rephrases for him. “I have better things to spend my time on than cleaning.” He considers Tristan’s feet still solidly on the other side of the door and clears his throat. “Are you going to come in or do I need to find the garlic and stakes?”

“I’m coming,” Tristan protests, but even then he pauses, considering the doorway like he’s never passed through it before. Alex waits, silent and watching, until Tristan’s crossed the barrier with such care that it prickles Alex’s own skin with a sense of importance borrowed secondhand from the deliberation of Tristan’s movements.

“It’s just my apartment,” he says, feeling strangely self-conscious as Tristan pushes the door shut behind him and looks around with strange focus, like he’s trying to dredge up some childhood memory. “It’s not like you haven’t been here before.”

“I don’t really remember it,” Tristan admits, reaching out to touch a stack of parts on one of the shelves by the door and skimming his fingers across the connections like he’s grounding himself. “Everything from then is kind of jumbled in my head.”

It’s a vague description but Alex doesn’t need more; he can reach into his own head for the blurred impressions over a handful of days, for the haze of color and motion and voices that slipped on each other when they handed back their own memories, everything going drunk-hazy except for Tristan: wide grey eyes and a guard uniform, the curve of a smile and Alex’s t-shirt, the line of pale hip and unfastened denim. Alex’s heart skids sideways, his breathing sticking in his throat, and he coughs to clear his throat again. “Yeah,” he manages, coming back forward over the gap between his feet and Tristan’s. “We really fucked ourselves up.”

“Yeah.” Tristan looks away from the metal parts and back to Alex’s face; his eyes are dark in the lighting, his hair pale. He looks hesitant, uncertain, like he’s not quite sure he belongs here, like a plant transplanted too hastily and unsure of its survival. Alex reaches for his shoulder, twists fingers into his hair; Tristan curves under the weight of his arm, tipping in towards him like Alex has called his name, and Alex’s heart skids against the inside of his chest.

“Oh well,” he says, pairing it with a crooked smile. “Won’t make that mistake again.”

Tristan’s smile is sudden, spreading over his expression like electricity crackling down a wire and lighting his eyes up from the inside as he glances down at Alex’s mouth and lets his gaze linger there.

“Right,” he says. “We wouldn’t want that.”

“I’m going to have to take you under my wing,” Alex informs him, getting his second hand up to brace Tristan’s waist, to slide down to settle heavy at his hip. “You have a lot to learn before you’re safe enough to be trusted with electronics again.”

“Hm,” Tristan says, considering. “I’m a fast learner.”

“I have a _lot_ to teach you,” Alex reiterates, more slowly this time. “You’ll be busy for a while.”

“Yeah.” Tristan lets his touch on the parts go and reaches for Alex’s hair instead. “I think I’m ready for it.”

When Alex draws him into a kiss, Tristan hums pleasure against his mouth, a warm spill of sound that purrs down Alex’s spine to ground him out against the floor.

Together, he thinks, they’ll be able to keep themselves stable.


End file.
